Big Journalism Defends Bachmann Staff, Compares ABC To Nazis

Written by Simon Maloy

Published

A couple of days ago, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross was reportedly roughly handled by members of Rep. Michele Bachmann's security team as he tried to ask the Republican presidential candidate about reports that she suffers from migraine headaches.

The behavior of Bachmann's staff has drawn criticism from several quarters, including (not surprisingly) ABC. ABC News senior vice president Jeffrey Schneider told the Washington Post: “It's unfortunate when physicality is involved. [Ross] was just doing his job.”

Bachmann, however, does have the support Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism. Blogger Warner Todd Huston wrote today that “what happened to Ross is fairly mild and all his fault,” and then responded to Schneider's quote with perhaps the most ridiculously inexplicable Nazi reference the internet has ever seen:

If you listen to the silly hyperbole from the far left blogrags, the media is being treated like the Egyptian protesters in Tahrir Square by Bachmann's campaign staff. Another lefty site says that Bachmann is indulging in “open conflict” with the press. Neither characterization is even close to the truth.

Jeffrey Schneider, a senior vice president for ABC news, denounced the incident saying, “He was certainly shoved around and pushed. It's unfortunate when physicality is involved. He was just doing his job.”

I remember members of an army sometime in the mid 1940s saying that they were innocent because they were just doing their jobs, too.

Hah! Brian Ross is a Nazi war criminal! What?

Even better, Huston's absurd Godwinning is sandwiched between four separate condemnations of “hyperbole” from the media and progressives:

In a fit of wild hyperbole, Ross called his treatment by Bachmann similar to the treatment he's received “mostly by Mafia people”...

[...]

If you listen to the silly hyperbole from the far left blogrags...

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With all this hyperbole and gnashing of teeth by the left...

[...]

In 2011 a reporter was simply blocked from getting to a candidate but not thrown to the ground. Result = outrage and hyperbole.

So Breitbart's Big Journalism wants us to get past all the overheated and outrageous rhetoric and focus on how ABC's Brian Ross is worse than Hitler. Perhaps then we can move on to the pressing matter of the crippling lack of self-awareness on right-wing blogs.