However, a larger question looms behind all of this. To anyone paying attention at all, it's obvious that there are some who can make explicit denunciations with impunity. Essentially, the article asserted that a majority of archaeologists doubted that the Jews were ever slaves in Egypt, and that the Exodus in fact never took place. Yet there was not a peep of protest from the JDL or the Anti-Defamation League. But then, an editorial would have been strange, because the newspaper in question was the Los Angeles Times.
Journalists have a difficult job.
They have to take the complexities of modern living, condense them into bite-size chunks, and do so in a limited time and space in order to help the consumers make sense of the world. The trouble starts when they rely too much on the information supplied by activist groups as a source of their stories. Since most journalists' sympathies tend toward the left side of the political spectrum, their stories often reflect the input from such entities as the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights League, Gays and Lesbians Allied Against Defamation and the Jewish Defense League. All of these groups have a history of distorting, and, in some cases, even manufacturing stories out of whole cloth to advance their particular agendas, which is why far-left political musings have found their way into mainstream media. In the last presidential campaign, for example, they criticized the statements of vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman when all he had done was to paraphrase the thoughts of George Washington on the role of religion in public morality.