ACLU man jailed for child porn gets a pass from the media while Craig twists in the wind

From the Monkey blog:

The media silence over the jailing of former ACLU leader Charles Rust-Tierney for downloading child pornography, including scenes of children being raped and tortured, is deafening. The New York Times, NBC and CNN are among the major broadcasters and newspapers who haven’t seen fit to cover the story. Others have limited their coverage to carrying the AP report on their websites.

The Washington Post did carry the story, presumably because Rust-Tierney was president of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter from 1993 to 2005. However, while on Friday its report was headlined Va.’s Ex-ACLU Chief Gets 7 Years for Child Porn, by the following day the Post had apparently decided that Rust-Tierney’s former position didn’t merit inclusion in the headline, changing it to Man Gets 7 Years In Child Porn Case.

And in neither story did the Post see fit to report that, several years ago, Rust-Tierney led the ACLU’s opposition in court to the Children’s Internet Protection Act (which was ultimately approved by Congress), arguing that internet filters in libraries designed to limit children’s access to pornography would interfere with their ability to learn and communicate. This is surely a pertinent fact, given that the ACLU maintains its opposition to restrictions on internet access, and supports groups such as the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Other news outlets that ran the story also chose to ignore this angle.

Compare the MSM’s almost total suppression of the Rust-Tierney case with the unrelenting and hysterical coverage of the Larry Craig story. Craig is accused of seeking to engage in behaviour, which, while repellent to many people, would have been between consenting adults, with no one getting physically hurt. But because Craig is a Republican who’s strong on family values he’s accused of hypocrisy, and faces a media lynching.

Rust-Tierney, on the other hand, used a computer in his 11-year-old son’s bedroom to view photos and videos depicting the rape and sexual torture of children as young as six. At least no one can accuse Rust-Tierney of hypocrisy: he liked to watch children being raped on the internet, and he and others at the ACLU support the right of every American to be able to watch children being raped on the internet.