The OmbudsGod debates the significance of the media's failure to delve into the Stalinist sponsorship of the Saturday's agitprop. TOG's correspondent argues:

For one thing, I suspect that many marchers, and perhaps many who did not march and would not have, probably would consider the American Nazi Party and the Klan much closer to being a clear and present danger to the public than ANSWER is or ever has been.

One could safely lay long odds that "many marchers" would consider ANSWER benign vis a vis the Nazi Party, but how is it that that value judgment informs journalistic norms? You can bet that if the American Nazi Party organized a march at which Republican politicians spoke, that fact would be front paged news. You can also bet that the fact that many participants and non-participants could accurately reason that (a) inasmuch as there are no hostile Fascist powers - the last one having been pretty much exterminated and purged - and (b) most American Nazis are semilliterate, that they are far less dangerous than a group of ideologues who do profess an ideological attachment to at least one - and prior to 1989, more than one - hostile foreign powers armed with nukes. But, hey, that kind of thinking is "McCarthyite."

This kind of journalistic disinterest has been going on for years, but this is the first time in my memory that the Stalinist sponsorship of a "peace protest" has been a subject of discussion. In fact, I heard Victor Davis Hanson discuss this issue today on local radio. Then, of course, there is this James Lilek's piece:

Nowadays, if you point out that someone’s a Communist, you might well be accused of - dum dum DUMMMM - McCarthyism. The term has morphed from its original meaning. It no longer means falsely accusing someone of being a Communist. It now includes correctly identifying someone as a Communist, or ascribing a taint to someone because they don’t reject the Communists in their midst. (I’ll admit there’s a significant difference between the two.)

But let’s leave this increasingly insupportable series of generalizations, and return to the point. Do reporters suppress the nature of ANSWER / ACTION because they don’t want to embarrass the movement? No. Do they secretly admire the ANSWER / ACTION / WWP positions on China, North Korea, and other dictatorships? Of course not. (Cuba is another story.) Are they inclined to wonder who’s behind the rallies? No. NeoNazis, Klansmen, Separatists, Militias, the Promise Keepers - these words make reporters’ antennae quiver. “Communist” does not. It’s an institutional blindspot, and if you doubt it, consider this:

A fashion designer premiers a line of clothes emblazoned with the hammer-and-sickle. The story runs in the variety section; there are quotes from fashionistas about retro iconography, the kitschy appeal of Socialist Realist art, and nostalgia for the stability of a binary, pre-terrorist world. The story would have the tone of a worldly cultured person peering through a monocle at a butterfly whose wings were amusingly deformed.

It is perplexing. There is nothing admirable about the Communists that you can't also find in Nazi ideology. Wear a swastika and you're walking leprosy; wear a red beret and it's a fashion statement. You know, I have never met a Nazi or a Klan member, but I went to law school with a card-carrying Communist. Nobody harassed him. He fit right in. But - jeez - the Gulag, the Katyn Massacre, the Ukraine famine, Stalin.....you know, that stuff. Nonetheless, you have to hope that this weekend perhaps saw the start of a healthy process which will result in consigning the Communists to the moral plague ward with the Nazis and the Klan.