There was absolutely nothing surprising in New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters using Michael Savage to attack Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Peters regularly wages war on the conservative media. Take a look:
-- On April 2, Peters wrote a front-page story with the online headline "Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing commentators turned a pandemic into a battle of us vs. them — the kind of battle President Trump has waged for much of his life.
He boasted a NewsBusters-style study of conservative media:
A review of hundreds of hours of programming and social media traffic from Jan. 1 through mid-March — when the White House started urging people to stay home and limit their exposure to others — shows that doubt, cynicism and misinformation about the virus took root among many of Mr. Trump’s boosters in the right-wing media as the number of confirmed cases in the United States grew.
Peters brought in Harvard professor Yochai Benkler to decry "a pattern that one expert in the spread of misinformation said resembled a textbook propaganda campaign." This is the same Ivy League socialist that Brian Stelter brought into his HBO documentary to compare right and left in the media: "There is an intentional deception on one side, and there is an honest if imperfect process of trying to get as near the truth as we can on the other."
-- In December, after a machete attack on a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, Peters appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe and boasted that the Times had proven a correlation between “the way that conservative radio hosts discuss, or talk about, denigrate immigrants” and violence. “Remember the El Paso shooting at Walmart,” he continued: “The language in that shooter’s manifesto was often word-for-word what you would hear on some prime time Fox News program.”
-- In September came this Peters story: “Talk of Misinformation, Just Not a Lot of Facts....How Right-Wing Media Talks About Impeachment -- The pro-Trump media has wasted no time constructing its own version of events about Ukraine”. Peters began by reporting how Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh and the conservative media "portrays the president’s political opponents and the mainstream media as contemptible and corrupt persecutors, blinded by hatred and their failure to bring him down so far."
Michael Harrison of Talkers magazine is brought in to say "It's victory at the expense of truth."
-- Last August, Peters and Ken Vogel wrote a story headlined “Trump’s Allies Scour Internet to Punish Press.” They ominously warned “A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.”
The Times was embarrassed by an old tweet where their own politics editor Tom Wright-Piersaniti nastily wished "Crappy Jew Year." A caption under a picture on this story warned “The operation is the latest step in a long-running effort by President Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting.”
So in other words, everything Peters and his gang do to undercut conservatives is heroic work for the public. Everything their critics report about them is "undercutting the influence of legitimate news reporting."
