Mark Steyn again

Here, from National Review magazine, is a wonderfully funny, on-the-mark point from Mark Steyn regarding Newsweek's approach to journalism:

“It’s important to remember,” Isikoff told the Washington Post, “there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here.” And that’s true. The fake Koran-flushing lives up entirely to the CBS bogus National Guard memos: an honest mistake that, like all the mainstream media’s honest mistakes, is a mistake that will, if true, damage the Bush administration. By contrast, when the Swiftvets come along, whoa, hold your horses, let’s get the slo-mo fact-checkers in for three or four months, at least until, say, mid-November. The only difference this time around is that there seems to be some serious damage to America’s reputation in parts of the Muslim world otherwise well disposed to the Great Satan — Afghanistan notably — and the little matter of 15 corpses, which makes Michael Isikoff considerably more lethal than, say, Lynndie England. *** When Christians get hot and bothered about a horny Jesus (The Last Temptation of Christ), a gay Jesus (Terrence McNally’s Broadway play Corpus Christi), or a Jesus floating in the artist’s urine (Piss Christ), columnists take to the barricades to champion the cause of free speech. When Muslim groups closed down a play in Cleveland because its revolting apologia for a Palestinian suicide bomber was insufficiently pro-Muslim, the silence of the media lambs was deafening. But somehow, when it’s the merest hint of a rumor of a canard about Bush stooges flushing the Koran down the toilet, Newsweek doesn’t bother thinking through the consequences. That’s the real problem here: not the reflex leftism but the pathetic hicky parochialism of a U.S. media unable to see things except through the tunnel vision of domestic partisan advantage. Who’s really the “culturally insensitive” ones here?