It takes a particularly bad reporter, and an even worse editor, to let a piece of garbage like this slip through at any newspaper, let alone the New York Times.
The American Family Association is a group considered a tad fringe and a tad nutty even by a lot of people I know on the right, yet the Times claims the group is "widely revered" in conservative circles, then cites the "Values Voters Summit" as proof of this. The Values Voters Summit is religious right circles, not conservatives circles. There's a difference. And not that I'm one to normally defend Republicans, but how bad is it that a NYT reporter, and apparently an editor, don't know the difference between conservatives and the religious right. Do we need to revisit what we learned in eighth grade math about subsets (an apple is a fruit, but all fruit are not apples).
But what's particularly galling about the Times' love letter to an officially designated hate group that's listed alongside the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Web site, is that the Times' reporter, Erik Eckholm, actually tried to dismiss the fact that the organization has been officially designated a "hate group" by the organization primarily responsible for officially designating "hate groups." According to Eckholm it's simply "liberal critics" who call AFA a hate group, and even then Eckholm makes clear from the way he constructs the sentence that it's a throw-away charge.
Also note that Eckholm and his editor claim that only liberal critics call AFA hateful and even shrill, but then Eckholm doesn't bother quoting what the AFA has actually said about gays. Oh, he's quotes some tame stuff, making it seem as though that's the worst AFA has said. What Eckholm doesn't quote is the really good stuff (I collected all those quotes via the link, they're real), the hateful stuff, the shrill stuff. And Eckholm doesn't quote it, and his editor didn't bother catching it, because the actual facts about the things AFA actually says would ruin the Times' effort to do a he-said-she-said on none of the most hateful, nuttiest groups of the religious.
Why doesn't Eckholm report on the fact that the AFA is promoting the anti-gay work of Paul Cameron, a man who's "'science' echoes Nazi Germany," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center? Cameron once famously suggested that gays might need to be exterminated, en masse, in order to stop the spread of AIDS. How does the NYT feel about that? You wouldn't know, because the Times just doesn't mention that AFA is promoting this guy's anti-gay "science." Why? Because according to the Times, only "liberal critics" find this kind of talk hateful and shrill.
Speaking of mass extermination, Eckholm then delves into his own Holocaust revisionism. Eckholm calls the bs claim from AFA's Bryan Fischer, that Hitler was gay, simply a "disputed theory." That means,some agree, some disagree, who can tell what's true? This is Holocaust revisionism, and was labeled as such by Hatewatch a good dozen years ago. And the Times is calling it a "disputed theory"? Yes, the NYT just gave credence to Holocaust revisionism.
Eckholm then links in his article to the AFA's diatribe about how Hitler was gay, yet Eckholm doesn't link to anything, doesn't quote anyone, showing that this is utterly insane and the worst of Holocaust revisionism. He actually linked to "proof" of this bs theory. And left it undisputed. Incredible.
Are they insane? A disputed theory? Do Eckholm and his editors also consider it a "disputed theory" that only a few Jews were killed in the Holocaust? After all, the other hate groups that the NYT implicitly exonerates by marginalizing the Southern Poverty Law Center, believe, outrageously, that not that many Jews were killed by the Nazis. So is that a "disputed theory" now too according to Erik Eckholm and the New York Times?
It's also therefore interesting that Eckholm doesn't bother mentioning the AFA's brush with anti-Semitism either. Let's share a few of the AFA's views on Jews, shall we?
Do Jews control Hollywood?
The AFA Journal has long served as a platform for anti-Semitic theories and innuendo. For instance, Wildmon warned of Jewish control over popular culture, an old anti-Semitic canard, in a January 1989 article, "What Hollywood Believes and Wants." "The television elite are highly secular," Wildmon wrote. "The majority (59 percent) in the Jewish faith." In a separate article in the same issue, titled "Anti-Semitism Called a Serious Problem," Wildmon, a longtime opponent of gay rights, pointedly remarked that "Jews favor homosexual rights more than other Americans."
Does a "Jewish upbringing" lead to a life of crime?
In the March issue of American Family Association Journal, a publication of Donald E. Wildmon's right-wing evangelical activist group, the American Family Association (AFA), author Randall Murphree suggested that a Jewish upbringing leads to hatred of Christians, and by extension, a criminal lifestyle.
Is that just the wacky criticism of a few liberal critics too?
Do your job, Erik. No one is asking you to do a hatchet job on the AFA. No one is asking you to be a liberal. We're asking you and your editor, to do your freaking jobs. If you're going to write about an officially designated hate group, don't try to whitewash who they are in the interest of fairness. Tell your readers who they are and let your readers decide. But they can't decide when your prose tries to minimize the facts, and when your prose doesn't even mention the most salient facts.
I could almost forgive a reporter who didn't have a clue who the AFA was - though really, you're writing for the New York Times, have you ever heard of the Google? But who is the editor who approved this garbage? No one at the New York Times is familiar with the AFA? No one knew of their anti-semitism? There wasn't a single editor at the Times who winced when Eckholm wrote that it's a "disputed theory" that Hitler was gay?
And I repeat: No one at the Times did a double take when one of their reporters attempted to claim that it was simply a "disputed theory" that Hitler was gay?
And you guys wonder why we criticize you.
Do your job.
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