House of Eratosthenes

Well, that takes care of my question about how & why liberals and progressives have a better rep for sympathetic, compassionate, and respectful treatment of women. When the opposite takes place, it simply goes unreported — by fiat.

AOL News has been bending over backwards lately to make sure that they do not cover the controversy surrounding Playboy.com writer Guy Cimbalo’s vile attack on conservative women. AOL News has taken some drastic steps to censor any mention, let alone criticism, of Playboy’s screed. They have deleted posts about the article, banned contributors from mentioning it, and even fired one of their liberal writers over it.

The fact that banning reporters from, well, reporting is so contrary to the purpose of a news organization it really is puzzling. It seems to be in direct contrast to their commitment to “traditional journalistic values”.

The evidence is stacking up quite high that AOL News fired liberal writer Tommy Christopher today due to his repeated attempts to get coverage of the Playboy attack list on AOL’s Politics Daily.

Christopher had first attempted to post this criticism of Playboy’s sick list the day it was published on their website. However, he was surprised to find that shortly after putting his article on Politics Daily it was deleted by an editor.

His surprise stemmed from the fact that in his two years of writing for the site not one other post had ever been deleted by an editor.

Another former Politics Daily writer NewsBusters spoke with, Caleb Howe, confirmed that fact. And while Tommy Christopher released a statement to NewsBusters criticizing AOL’s decision to let him go Caleb Howe went further than Tommy in his opinion of AOL’s motives.

“His coverage of the Playboy “hate f***” list must have had a lot to do with Tommy being fired, if not everything to do with it” Howe told NewsBusters. “It would be absurd to think the timing is coincidental” referring to the fact that Christopher was fired three days after his original Playboy story and only hours after pitching a new story on the same topic. Further allegations of AOL censoring coverage of the Playboy controversy came to light when Christopher and Howe appeared on Media Lizzy’s show this afternoon.

At the 74:50 mark of the show Media Lizzy (Elizabeth Blackney) claimed that her editor, Michael Kraskin, sent her an email regarding a question she submitted for the AOL Hot Seat Poll. Her original question was going to be “does Playboy empower or exploit women”. In his response email Media Lizzy claimed that Kraskin asked for a different question and said “This Playboy story is something we have internally decided not to address”.

Tommy Christopher claimed on the show that AOL told him the story was pulled because the Playboy story was too profane. However, Christopher’s story censored out all of the profanity and given Media Lizzy’s claims it seems that no mention of the Playboy story would be acceptable to AOL. Plus there is a post by Christopher that has been on AOL’s Politics Daily (until recently called Political Machine) for nearly a year with several uncensored curse words and was not mentioned as a problem by anyone NewsBusters contacted.

NewsBusters contacted Politics Daily’s editor in chief, Melinda Henneberger who both deleted Tommy Christopher’s original story and fired him, for comment but she never returned our email.

As Christopher notes in the statement he released to NewsBusters he was a productive and successful writer for AOL. He is a well respected, widely read, and widely linked writer. His stories and opinions have been featured on Bill O’Reilly, Hot Air, Red State, The College Politico, The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and even NewsBusters. It seems highly unlikely that AOL fired him for lack of performance and it is important to note that nobody has claimed that as of now.

With all of this it seems that coincidental timing is an extremely hard sell for why Tommy Christopher was fired by AOL News today. It appears that Christopher was intent on covering a story which he found to be particularly important but that AOL News had “internally decided” was off limits.

What has the liberal/progressive movement done for women lately, anyway? At this point it seems a more than fair question to ask. Last summer the democrat party had a formal convention that specifically addressed — specifically addressed, I say again, as a priority above all others — who has the superior victim-cred, between women and persons-of-color. It is quite absurd to offer the idea that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama represented significantly different policy positions, on much of anything. The dust-up was about victim-cred, and very little else. Which of the two candidates could stand behind spectacularly bad policies and then get away with it, accusing any & all critics of engaging in some kind of “ism”?

Anyway, the gals were found to be lacking. Better to accuse the critics-of-bad-policies of racism, than of sexism. That would do a better job of avoiding reasoned scrutiny and debate. And so Hillary was asked to step down. Typical party shenanigans: Ask not what the party can do for the people, ask instead what the people can do for the party.

The rest is history. The democrat party went on a tear, spending vast sums of Soros money convincing the public that the opposing ticket was dangerously inadequate because the vice-presidential candidate on that ticket was a dumb ol’ girl. Stupid inbred midwestern-accent redneck hick from Alaska who could see Russia from her house, and all that.

Bottom-line: They haven’t been pro-women — in any way other than advocating more baby-butchery — in a very long time. To actually defend women when someone comes along to harm, or to threaten, is an agenda that has fallen by the wayside.

Of course, officially, AOL isn’t really supposed to be a liberal advocacy group. And neither is Playboy. They’re just doing things that are considered, rightfully or wrongly, to be politically correct and “mainstream.” And because of that, this disrespect is a poor reflection on all of us. It speaks to who we have been allowing to win arguments, and who we have been determined to see lose the next argument. This late disrespect toward women shows how our sense of civility has come full-circle, and we have now devolved downward. If you could thaw out the average English knight from eight hundred years ago, he’d be our superior in every single way when it comes to treating women with decency…and the representative from our age would be left stammering “uh yeah, but, but I would support her right to end a pregnancy and…and…” …and that would be it.

Well, during a divorce, we award women custody of the kids even if the mom is a coke-fiend. And we give her lots of her ex-husband’s money for no reason. We make movies about stupid idiot dads, and we make sure movie moms are never, ever stupid or incompetent — just unpleasant. Other than that, our society hasn’t really shown much old-fashioned respect to the fairer sex. Once our liberals say it’s in their interests to abuse or threaten women, such as compiling a hate-fuck list against good-looking conservative ladies — AOL does an adequate job here of representing our prevailing societal response. We have internally decided not to address it. If it’s female-friendly enough to our left-wing progressive politically-correct types, well then surely it must be female-friendly enough for the rest of us.

Toward the objective of becoming more P.C. and more civilized, we’ve become, in some ways, a culture of uncultured, uncouth clowns. Women who don’t occupy the correct spot on the ideological spectrum, are now fair game.

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Something We Have Internally Decided Not to AddressMonday, June 8th, 2009

Something We Have Internally Decided Not to Address
Monday, June 8th, 2009