Double standard?

Jeff Jacoby asks why Mel Gibson gets slammed by the media and Oliver Stone isn't.

Yet far from triggering a media storm, Stone’s anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering barely stirred a breeze.

Seven days after his words first appeared, Nexis had logged fewer than 150 items mentioning Stone’s toxic rhetoric. On ABC, CBS, and NBC, the news shows completely ignored the story. The New York Times restricted its coverage to two short items in its “Arts, Briefly" section — and few other papers ran even that much.

Media mogul Haim Saban did urge Showtime to cancel Stone’s documentary, and posted an online message calling on Hollywood to give Stone “a vigorous shove into the land of forced retirement." But few if any media voices seconded the motion — not a word from Slate, for example — and some went out of their way to pooh-pooh it: Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein pronounced the idea “not so different" from “the infamous 1950s Hollywood blacklist."

Gibson and Stone are both guilty of indulging in rank anti-Semitism (for which both promptly “apologized"), but only Gibson was buried under a newsroom avalanche of outrage and disgust. What explains that glaring difference? Surely the media don’t think Jew-baiting is intolerable only when it comes from a right-wing Christian like Gibson. Surely they wouldn’t overlook Stone’s noxious rant just because he is a pluperfect left-wing activist.

Jacoby raises a great point. Where is the media in slamming Stone?