Hey Jonah Goldberg,

I couldn’t help but notice your outraged, hyperbolic post today decrying a new low for the mainstream media. Juxtaposing the media debate over alleged violent Tea Party rhetoric in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting to a random clip you saw of the Today Show this morning, you extrapolated a double standard pertaining to how the media covered recent verbiage directed at the Tea Party. Specifically you honed in on a quote from Joe Biden comparing the Tea Party faction of Congress to “terrorists.”

“Imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called) a ‘bunch of terrorists’ on the day Giffords returned to the Congress,” you wrote. “Would the mainstream media notice or care? Would Meet the Press debate whether this raises ‘troubling questions’ about the White House’s sensitivity? Would Andrea Mitchell find some way to blame Sarah Palin for Dick Cheney’s viciousness? Would Keith Olbermann explode like a mouse subjected to the Ramone’s music in Rock and Roll High School? Something inside me hidden away shouts, ‘Hell yes they would!'”

Jonah, I’d like to introduce you to a new technological advancement: Google. Invented by two Stanford engineers, Google is a search tool that allows you type in “key words” and it crawls the web, using algorithms beyond your apparent realm of understanding, to return you “search results.” If you were to enter the keywords “biden” and “terrorists,” for instance, you would see that nearly every mainstream media outlet in existence has covered Biden’s remarks, several of which quoted Republicans criticizing the remarks with unequivocally disparaging words.

I suspect that the National Review, at any given moment, employs a number of college educated unpaid 20-something interns. Might I suggest appointing one of them as the NRO’s resident Googler? I suspect such a simple appointment would help you avoid roughly 90% of your weekly errors.

Regards,
Simon Owens

Simon Owens is the Director of PR of JESS3. You can read his blog, follow him on on Twitter, or email him at [email protected]