Newsroom culture
James Taranto over at OpinionJournal.com notes an unintentionally revealing story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on two women who are going to spend some not-serious-enough time in prison.
"Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum seem unlikely criminals," declares an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Well-educated young women passionate about environmental causes, they share a love of the outdoors and similar backgrounds.
Then we get some background on them. Both attended the same high school in Spokane, Wash. Phillabaum was "bright, outspoken, sometimes in-your-face but never dull." Kolar, who studies science, "had the makings of a good scientist, her adviser said, but her heart seemed elsewhere."
Then we get to what they did:
The women were concerned about what was going on around them--the logging of old-growth forests, the slaughter of animals for sport. Like many Northwest activists, they pushed for change.
But their activism morphed into something more dangerous--and now both are headed to prison.
Before dawn on May 21, 2001, Kolar cut the glass that allowed fellow Earth Liberation Front members to sneak into the University of Washington office of professor Toby Bradshaw, who was studying the genetics of fast-growing hybrid poplar trees. Phillabaum's role is still unclear, but she was also on the scene, court documents show.
Bradshaw and other researchers at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture would be arriving within hours, so the ELF squad must have worked quickly to plant the firebombs--plastic buckets of fuel rigged with cheap digital timers, assembled in someone's garage. Their goal: destroy the research on genetic engineering of poplars to avert an "ecological nightmare" for native forests.
Mostly the piece is more puffery--we learn that Phillabaum "was socially conscious even as a teenager," that she had "a strong mind of her own," and that she once worked for a nonprofit where she was "an exemplary employee. Kolar is a bit less appealing: "bright and skilled but distracted" while in college, "passionate about animal rights." Her doctoral adviser says, "It's not the least bit surprising to me that she carried her passions that far."
Taranto then points out that it is unlikely similar, sympathetic treatment would have been forthcoming from the Post-Intelligencer if the two young women were pro-lifers bombing an abortion clinic or the offices of a stem-cell researcher.
What's showing here is the blind bias of a culturally homogeneous newsroom. It probably never occurred to anyone -- from the reporter to the line editor to the supervising editors to the copy editors -- that just maybe such a sympathetic portrait of arsonists is a little beyond the pale.
And don't think that this is limited to the Post-Intelligencer -- the same thing could've easily happened in just about any newspaper in the country.
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This is the same mindset that got a Clinton-appointed judge to give terrorist attorney Lynne Stewart 28 months in prison when she was supposed to get upwards of 30 years.
The next time anyone says that the American media except Fox are not liberal (and far, far left at that), they should get a punch in the nose.