Why the media ignores ‘white Farrakhan’

Kevin Drum has an interesting theory on why the media has not been pushing John McCain to distance himself from the endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee, whom Steve Benen labels “an anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, and anti-Semitic televangelist.”

It’s funny, but in a way I think this is a demonstration of the condescending attitude that a lot of urban reporters have toward evangelicals. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Basically, they figure that these guys are all lunatic nutballs with weird beliefs, and they’re so used to this idea that they give it a pass when it pops into the news. It’s just Uncle Bob. You know how he gets. If they actually took evangelicals seriously, instead of treating them like members of long-lost Amazon tribes, they’d pay more attention to stories like this and they wouldn’t give McCain a free pass on Hagee’s endorsement.

Having worked as a religion reporter for a pair of daily papers, I tend to agree with Drum.