Yesterday I posted a blog regarding Oliver Stone’s apology for anti-Semitic comments made to the Sunday Times of London in which I expressed surprise that anyone would be surprised to find anti-Semitism on the left.

I suggested that the left-leaning media has been, if anything, a bit hostile toward the State of Israel and, relatively, indifferent to anti-Semitism within its own ranks (though selective outrage does manage to be mustered when anti-Semitic remarks are spouted by conservative Christians like Mel Gibson).

Anyway, in the piece about Stone’s mea culpa I noted that “The apology came after the Wall Street director was called out for his
remarks by the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee but drew
relatively little uproar in the mainstream media.”

That drew this response from a reader:

Really? Tell me, how much searching through mainstream media did you do
before coming to this conclusion? I do a Google News search on the term “Oliver
Stone anti-semitism” and get a number of hits on mainstream media outlets such
as the NY Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and
several others. Most of these stories came out (according to the date/time stamp
on the webpages) within 24 hours of the Times of London story, and included at
length the remarks from the ADL and AJC.

I believe that your clearly biased remark is demonstrably incorrect, and can
be proven so by anyone with the time and ability to do a 30 second Google news
search.

But, don’t let me stop you from promulgating your meme.

My response: I can google “Apple Pie” and garner 7,030,000 results. I’m sure many of them come from mainstream media outlets. The fact that googling “Oliver Stone anti-Semitism” produces results says nothing of the nature of those results.

I think if you were living and breathing you were probably made aware of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rantings on page one of newspapers throughout the country and on many, many segments of TV programs like The Today Show.  BTW, I watch the The Today Show almost every morning and if there was a single featured segment about Oliver Stone’s remarks I missed it.

Mentioning the story somewhere on your website or within the newspaper is not the same as giving it major play. 

As NewsBusters notes, four days after Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant to a police officer in 2006 Neal Gabler wrote for Salon.com “Hollywood may shun Mel Gibson for his anti-Semitic ravings, but the right wing
in George Bush’s increasingly hate-filled America won’t.“  Try googling “Neal Gabler Oliver Stone anti-Semitism.” See what you find.

There has actually been good deal of talk of Hollywood shunning Mel Gibson (back in 2006 as well as now). In fact, William Morris Endeavor recently dumped him as a client and its CEO Ari Emanuel wrote about that decision in the Huffington Post entitled The Bottom Line on Mel Gibson’s Anti-Semitic Remarks.

Emanuel writes: “People in the entertainment community, whether Jew or gentile, need to
demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally
shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him, even if it means a sacrifice
to their bottom line.”

CAA, Stone’s agency, is apparently sticking with him.

And, despite some calls from Emanuel and media mogul Haim Saban for Showtime to put the kibosh on Stone’s upcoming Showtime documentary series A Secret History of America, the project is apparently going forward.

Compare that to ABC’s decision following Gibson’s 2006 DUI arrest to cancel development of a miniseries about the Holocaust that Mel Gibson’s production company was set to produce.

All this is not to defend Gibson or condemn Stone. Anti-Semitism is a terrible thing whether it comes from the right or the left and I pray from anyone who suffers from it.

But, let’s face it, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the Progressive media’s degree of outrage seems more determined by the messenger than the message.