This interview is worth a read. I’ve clipped some of the best stuff for you, the emphasis there is my own:

BuzzFlash > Interview > Mark Crispin Miller: Propaganda expert and communications professor Mark Crispin Miller has always paid close attention to the symbiosis between the Bush administration and the mainstream press.

MCM: The media’s bizarre avoidance of this very juicy story makes a few things very clear–or I should say, very clear again. First of all, it’s further proof that there is no “liberal bias” in the US corporate press–none whatsoever… Simply put, the US media reports sex scandals only when they seem to tar “the left,” i.e., the Democratic party. As long as they involve the Democrats, the press is clearly willing to report such scandals even when they’re fabricated. On the other hand, the press goes deaf and blind to “moral” scandals that involve Republicans, no matter how egregious and well-documented.

…So Clinton’s sex life was fair game. Not only did the press go ape-shit over his affair with Monica, but US journalists were often not reluctant to run rumors, or at least allow the rightist rumor mongers to rave on uncontradicted.

…If this had happened in a Democratic White House, there would be no escaping it, and the rightists would be shrieking that the President of the United States had taught our precious children all about gay sex for hire.

…It’s typical. There was a big sex scandal back in 1989, reported by, of all organs, the Washington Times, which broke the story of a male prostitution ring with lots of clients in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and a midnight tour of the White House by six revelers, two of them male prostitutes. Did anybody ever hear of that again?

…So William Bennett’s gambling got a lot of press, but his employment of Mistress Lee was not reported anywhere. Gary Condit’s affair with–and alleged murder of–Chandra Levy was The Story You Could Not Escape for weeks right up to 9/11, even though there was no evidence that he had harmed her. On the other hand, Laurie Klausutis, an intern in Joe Scarborough’s office, was allegedly murdered, right in his office, but it was all, some would contend, hushed up completely (and yet Scarborough sometimes whines about it anyway). We heard a lot about Woody Allen’s situation–Newt Gingrich even crowed that it was typical “liberal” behavior–but when it turned out that the president of Hillsdale College, a far-right institution, had been boffing his own daughter-in-law, who went and blew her brains out in despair, that icky item had no legs. In fact, it had no torso, and no head. It simply wasn’t, because the press will not go there when it involved the right.

BuzzFlash: Many Democrats are afraid to touch the Gannon/Guckert affair because he’s gay, and they feel guilty about being critical of gays. But three of the main sites that are leading the story are run by openly gay men who find homophobe gays like Gannon/Guckert abhorrent.

MCM: Those liberals who refuse to speak out on this issue just don’t get it. They think they’re being politically correct concerning gays, when all they’re really doing is covering for the sickest homophobes. It was much the same thing with those Democrats who wouldn’t make an issue of Bill Frist and his family making major profits off abortion.

…The point of going after Gannon/Guckert for his day job–and outing all his rightist clients–is not an anti-gay move. Rather, it’s a way to demonstrate the bad faith of the homophobes, and, still more important, the psychological impossibility of their position. To note that this whole gay-baiting movement is itself the work of closet cases is to illuminate the pathological dimension of that movement.

…Inept and hypocritical they are indeed, but what this scandal tells us is way more profound… This is the animus that drives the Bushevik movement–more than greed, more than oil, more than imperialism. The movement is, ultimately, pathological. Which explains its compulsive hatefulness. Every time the Bushevik vents his spleen against “the liberals,” he’s actually referring to himself. “The liberals,” he insists, are lying, bitter diehards, who would do anything to stay in power; they steal elections; they are “a coalition of the wild-eyed”; and on it goes forever. If the movement weren’t relentlessly projective, it would just disappear.

…the mainstream press will be that much likelier to come around if/when they can no longer fail to see the Busheviks’ disastrous impact on the economy. That’s the one line that no US regime can cross for long.

…This may shed some light on Doug Wead’s strange decision to go public with those tapes of Bush before the coup. The true believers have to be disgusted, or at least uneasy, at the fact that Bush is soft on gays (or worse).

BuzzFlash: Is it possible that, if the truth about the gay randiness in the modern Republican homophobe party got out to the red state believers, there might be a pitchfork rebellion against Rove, Bush and their homophobe hypocrites?

MCM: Yes.