August 3, 2006

The Cowardice of The Hume

It's been several days since the world learned of Actor Mel Gibson's arrest and subsequent drunken anti-semitic tirade which was directed at the officers who arrested him, and yet not a mention has been made of the incident in Brit Hume's Grapevine. This is interesting given that, just a few days earlier, Hume was insisting to his viewers that that the European Left has a problem with rampant anti-Semitism (though the examples he gave were not particularly convincing ones). If Hume is worried about the perceived anti-Semitism of the European Left, then why is he not similiarly concerned about the overt anti-Semitism of the director of "The Passion of the Christ," a Hollywood mega-star and darling of the American Christian right?

This is not the first time that Hume has avoided topical issues that were discussed in recent segments, but which re-appear in a light much less favorable to Hume's ideological project. Readers of this blog (I know you're out there!) may recall that when the Washington Post decided in March to hire conservative blogger Ben Domenech for its online publication, Brit Hume was more than happy to cover the discontent that swelled in the liberal blogsophere as a result. However, when Domenech was fired a few days later among allegations that he had been plaigarizing the work of other journalists since his days as a student-reporter at William and Mary and well into his stint as assitant editor at the National Review, Hume and the Grapevine seemed to have forgotten that Domenech had ever existed (though the scandal was widely reported in the media).