ANDREW BREITBART: BENEFICIARY OF REPARATIONS

On the phone on the evening of July 20, a friend asked me: "Can Breitbart possibly survive?" I could only laugh incredulously. I answered: "Of course he'll survive, and undamaged. The incident won't matter at all."

There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone.

... there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.

--David Frum

Frum's lament is that Breitbart will survive because right-wingers won't abandon him. But the real reason he'll survive is that he's likely to be a mainstream media agenda-driver again at some point in the future -- the next time he gins up a phony story that seems juicy enough, the MSM will almost certainly rise to the bait.

And why is that?

Let's take a word righties love to wield as a club and turn it right back around on them: this really is a case of reparations. What I mean is that the MSM believes it owes the right endless recompense for the alleged sin of having been "the liberal meda" all these years. Right-wingers have been guilt-tripping the MSM for decades. It's beyond just "working the refs" -- they've whined that they're the victims of persistent discrimination; they insist that they have a right to banish all objectivity on talk radio and Fox News because the ill effects of the discrimination they perceive haven't come close to being reversed ... and guilt-tripped editors accept this line of argument, and thus won't treat the Breitbarts and Limbaughs and Coulters and Ericksons as pariahs, no matter what lies or slurs they utter, because they feel it would be prejudicial to do so.

Right-wingers see "reparations" for African Americans taking place everywhere they look, even though no one else can see what they see. Meanwhile, real reparations -- for grossly exaggerated or nonexistent suffering -- take place every time another irresponsible demagogue of the right-wing media is given the floor by the mainstream press. And it's not likely to end soon.

(Frum via Memeorandum.)