… and it turns out he’s more of an apologist for Limbaugh than it seemed at first.

See “Lionizing Limbaugh,” below, for details on exactly how credulous Zev Chafets’ NYT Magazine profile on Limbaugh was last Sunday. The writer was on “On the Media” the other day, and, under questioning from host Bob Garfield, shows himself as dismissive of basic issues of honesty and fairness as his subject.

ZEV CHAFETS: […] I’m not an apologist for Rush Limbaugh, but I’m a little bit defensive because I think that the liberal media takes such an unfair view of him.

I hear people being vilified on the radio, on all sorts of radio stations by all sorts of people all day long. And Limbaugh is not worse than many of the ones I hear, even on NPR. He just has a different point of view.

Emphasis added. This is dishonest. Even if you accept that NPR somehow typifies the liberal media, equating that with the antics of a far right clown is outside of the bounds of fair comment. (This is a NYT writer, not a political interviewee. It’s incumbent on him to be honest, not dispense flip political talking points.)

Garfield then cites a few bits of typical cant from Limbaugh, and Chafets tries to defend them.

BOB GARFIELD: “The NAACP should have a riot rehearsal, they should get a liquor store and practice robberies”?

ZEV CHAFETS: Not my sense of humor, but it’s not a lie.

BOB GARFIELD: Did Limbaugh not say that Abu Ghraib was no worse than a Skull and Bones initiation?

ZEV CHAFETS: Yeah, he did. It’s his opinion.

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. Did he not deny that genocide was committed against the American Indian and state that the population is higher now than it was before Christopher Columbus—of Native Americans?

ZEV CHAFETS: Mm, I don’t know. I didn’t ask him that either. I don’t know what the population was before Christopher Columbus.

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, it was about 15 million and, you know, by the 19th century it was 250,000. I mean, that’s what – that’s the numbers.

Okay, now I know [LAUGHS] you don’t want to be an apologist for Rush Limbaugh or his spokesmen.

ZEV CHAFETS: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: But do you not think that he is answerable for things that are, at minimum, offensive and obnoxious and mean spirited that he has said on the air?

ZEV CHAFETS: Yeah, you know, I do think that, and I think he’s answerable to the public. And I think that for people who find him more obnoxious and more mean spirited than other people that they prefer to listen to, then they should answer him by turning him off.

Here at the end, Chafets is again intellectually dishonest, deflecting what he knows is the real question, which is that these are issues he didn’t take up with Limbaugh when he had the chance to.

The final irony: One of Limbaugh’s bits of cant is that the “liberal media” is out to attack him. Turns out the representative from that big bad media was … a lap dog like Chafets.

My friend Eric Boehlert has more on Chafets’ recumbent journalism here.

This isn’t an argument about politics; it’s about how the tactics of the right wing are too often based on dishonesty.

For example:

You may have been following the complaints about some recent Fox News attacks on a couple of NYT reporters, Jacques Steinberg and Steve Reddicliffe. (Disclosure: I’ve had a few professional dealings with Reddicliffe.) The “Fox and Friends” show has been ridiculing the pairs’ coverage of the network, complete with some photoshopped caricatures. David Carr discussed them Monday:

In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, [Steinberg’s] ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with.

That evening, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly got into the fray and responded. Video of his rant can be found here.

Now, here’s the problem. He has a point at the end, and I think a legitimate one. Why is it OK for the Times to caricature him, but it’s not OK for Fox to caricature Steinberg?  Now, I think there’s a case to be made that there is a difference (the Fox show was carrying corporate water, for one) but whatever.

But the first part of O’Reilly’s rant is the problematic part. He brings up a story Steinberg did comparing the ratings on the various cable channels.

You can read Steinberg’s story here. It bends waaay over backwards to be nice to Fox—discussing its ratings pre-eminence in the lede, for example—but has the numbers to make its point, which is that, while the network is still ahead, CNN has been greatly increasing its numbers in the under-50 ratings demos.

O’Reilly dismisses the story, rattling off some statistics involving overall ratings, which, again, Steinberg had acknowledged in the lede of his story.

This is what I mean by intellectual dishonesty. To go back to Chafets’ cheap shot about NPR, above: You can call NPR liberal all you want, but I know, from having worked there, that the culture is one where, on an ongoing, day-to-day basis, stories and positions are questioned on these matters.

Is it fair? Is that correct? Are you taking something out of context? Any news organization makes mistakes, of course, but discussions like that are part of the work that goes into each day’s programming at a serious news operation. At Fox, they’re not.