WUI (Writing under the influence)

I wrote to the reporter who penned that piece on Forest Grove and how it has become a liberal progressive mecca. I wanted her to acknowledge that attributing that last quote to a non-progressive (given that politics in the US is pretty much binary, it must have been a conservative or at least a Republican) was a case of MSM bias against conservatives. This is what she said:

"Thanks for your email. I have no problem imagining that some Democrats could be racist -- and after talking it over with my editor, we don't think the wording implied otherwise. I can see that given the progressive-conservative dichotomy I'd been using throughout the story you might think it was implied, but I specifically reworded the passage to avoid that impression. I also tried to write about the difficulty of labels in the 'What is a progressive?' sidebar so that readers would be warned not jump to conclusions related to labels and would understand that who we are (and whether or not we are racist, for example) is much more complex than can be captured in a single label. I don't think readers are jumping to the conclusion that conservatives are racist, but I do think it was important to include that story just to show that even in Forest Grove such attitudes pop up every so often."

I don't get it. My sons who are in 4th and 6th grade knew that the following quote meant only one thing:

"Progressives aren't the only ones who lash out. Last Thursday, for example, Pacific professor Mike Steele said he was carrying a lawn sign from the city's Obama campaign office to his car when a car slowed and a young man yelled, 'If it ain't white, it ain't right!'"

If progressives are not the only ones, that means that the jerk who can't even speak proper English must have been the opposite. Well, let me think. Who could that be? Oh, yes, a liberal.

Wrong!!!

Is her bias so strong as to make her and her editor completely oblivious to it? Or do they think their readers (in major part liberals themselves) are too stupid or to blind to pick on it?

I guess the latter.