I'll give Ben Shapiro this: He's always entertaining, if only for his impression of Alex P. Keaton's evil twin Skippy, which causes me to laugh so loud I scare the neighbors.
Brian Stelter invited Shapiro and Thomas Frank on to debate whether the media shaped the response to Arizona's anti-gay law, or the response shaped media reports. It's a chicken-or-egg argument with no clear answer. After all, one of the responsibilities of media should be to report the facts about issues, right? In Arizona's case, it would have been malpractice not to inform the public about the very real, painful consequences of this so-called religious liberty law.
Speaking for every poor soul who longs for his comfort zone on Fox News, Shapiro laid it on the table, saying "there's no question that the media is bias to the left and there's also no question that the media is very much in favor of fascistic government that gets to control what religious people do with their private businesses."
Dude. Get out the pitchforks and torches, why doncha? Fascistic government would be the kind that thinks it's perfectly all right for gays to be turned away at the door because liberty.
Stelter let that one go and tossed a softball, asking if he felt persecuted when he appears in the media. Really, Brian? Shapiro replied, "As far as being on the defense, being from the right on a left network like CNN, sure, of course, I'm on the defensive, and I go in with game planning for it. I mean, it's not the same thing as going on FOX News which, obviously, leans to the right."
What? Say it isn't so, Ben! You're saying Fox News isn't fair and balanced? How could you?
Besides the comedy gold of Thomas Frank having to practically squish his face inside out to keep from laughing out loud, the other memorable part of this clip is the text CNN chose to put next to Shapiro when he was full screen. Why the hell didn't they just put Boy Wonder under his name?
If ever there was an argument for stunted social development correlations with child prodigy types, Ben Shapiro is living evidence of it.