Ed Morrissey has today's must-read post. That his topic hasn't appeared in say, Time, Newsweek, or the New York Times, tells you everything you need to know about why the Blogosphere is flourishing, and the legacy media is, well, the legacy media.

Update: Morrissey writes:

Short of ensuring that the Gitmo prisoners belong there and get treated humanely -- three hots and a cot and no abuse -- I couldn't care less about their reading material. If they get Qu'rans, fine. If not, fine. If their Qu'rans get wet, kicked, dropped, laughed at, or ignored, let the military deal with the disciplinary issues, but it isn't newsworthy. Why should we give a damn about it? What happened to our sense of priorities?

The media and the Leftist establishments such as the ACLU and Amnesty International use crap like this to set up impossible standards of behavior, then pretend that we're no better than our enemies when we fail to perfectly meet them. That's why AI used the "gulag" comparison earlier this week, and why Michael Isikoff and Newsweek decided to break the story that rampant abuse of printed material occurred at Gitmo. It's a deliberate attempt to undermine support for a war they don't like, and pathetically, Americans seem to have fallen for the hype.

In other words, it's hypocrisy that hasn't been seen on this level since the left and the media (sorry to repeat myself) turned on a dime from claiming that Clarence Thomas trying to hit on Anita Hill was a Crime Against Humanity, but all of the charges that emanated from Bill Clinton's trousers was just between consenting adults.

If the media wants to claim that defacing the Koran in a POW camp full of captured terrorists is the crime of the century, then it needs to follow its own logic to its natural conclusion: no more claiming that "art" such as Piss Christ is a bold artistic statement. No more episodes like this on Law & Order and other TV shows, unless they're roundly condemned by the press. An article such as Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" should be a multi-part investigative feature in the New York Times. There should be regular articles condemning the attacks of the ACLU against religious Christians or Christmas celebrations.

Because without a similar tone to coverage of religion in the US, Koran abuse stories at Gitmo looks exactly like it is: grandstanding hypocrisy of the worst order.

So how 'bout it, MSM? We now know how ardently you'll defend a religion which is practiced by about three million Americans according to Daniel Pipes, and roughly double that from other sources. Ready to start defending the Judeo-Christian faiths practiced by--or at a bare minimum, respected by--the other 290 million people in this country?

No? Then your vaunted claims of neutrality should require to step back a bit--maybe a couple of hundred miles--from hyping this story.

Update: Ed Morrissey also mentions that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has been going on Air America to refer to Christian broadcasters as "sort of our home-grown Taliban," adding, "They have a direct line to God. And if you don't tune into their line, you're obviously on Satan's line."

As I said above, if the media expects its claims of Koran abuse to be taken seriously by the American public, anti-Christian rhetoric such as Harkin's (and that of numerous other leftwing politicians) should also be equally strenuously condemned. That it's not speaks volumes of the media's duplicity.

Very Late Update (10/9/05): Welcome Instapundit readers; more on this topic, here.