In a post on National Review’s blog The Corner, Jonah Goldberg complains about a double standard in media coverage of partisan misperceptions (suggesting, without any evidence, that liberals think 9/11 conspiracy theorists are “quirky and no big deal”):
“Birtherism” is dangerous and paranoid and “Trutherism” is quirky and no big deal, according to liberals.
Here’s the New York Times on the Truthers (if you can’t get through the firewall, here’s the Newsbusters synopsis). The Times called them “a society of skeptics and scientists who believe the government was complicit in the terrorist attacks.” Skeptics and scientists! No wonder even the Truthers hailed it as favorable coverage.
And here is the latest on the Birthers from last Friday’s New York Times. In fairness, the Times doesn’t call them racists or dangerous — I guess they leave that to Frank Rich & Co. — but it is quite fed up with them. The piece is all about how the Birthers have become an outright nuisance to state officials in Hawaii. Here’s the opening:
HONOLULU — The conspiracy theorists who cling to the false belief that President Obama was born outside the United States outrage many Democrats and embarrass many Republicans. But to a group of Hawaii state workers who toil away in a long building across from the Capitol, they represent something else: a headache and a waste of time.
If only the Times could have been this dismissive of the Truthers. I guess they never created any bureaucratic-paperwork hassles for government officials, so they’re okay.
There’s no question that the 2006 Times article which Goldberg quotes is irresponsible in its generally respectful treatment of the 9/11 conspiracists. In fairness, though, the author eventually notes that the claims that the WTC was brought down by explosives is “directly contradicted by the 10,000-page investigation by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology” and that “the 9/11 Truthers are dogged, at home and in the office, by friends and family who suspect that they may, in fact, be completely nuts.”
In addition, Goldberg is wrong to suggest that the Times was not dismissive of the Truthers. An article published in September 2006 (and easily accessible via Google) is headlined “2 U.S. Reports Seek to Counter Conspiracy Theories About 9/11.” It describes the movement’s members as “an angry minority” of “an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers and others” who believe in “a shadowy and sprawling plot” that is “utterly implausible” according to government officials and faces “enormous obstacles to its practicality.”
More generally, Goldberg should be ashamed of himself for soft-pedaling birtherism (“the basic allegation isn’t that crazy, at least in the abstract”) and using the occasion of a Times article that is appropriately critical of birthers to complain about truther coverage from 2006. It’s yet another example of the reflexive way in which bias critics spew lazy claims of media double standards. Shouldn’t he be more outraged that people are making false accusations about the legitimacy of the president of the United States?
Update 5/17 4:40 PM: See also Jonathan Chait, who notes that the June 2006 NYT article Goldberg criticizes calls truthers “conspiracy buffs” and points out that birthers have received more coverage as a result of “gaining at least soft support” from numerous Republican elected officials (unlike truthers, who were widely shunned by Democratic politicians).