It's because they ELECT their wingnuts...

Recently I've found myself in conversations that went something like this.

'The Left has their nutjobs too.'
'Yes, but the media is biased, I mean only Fox News gave airtime to the 9/11 Truthies, and that was to mock them and paint the left with that brush. It doesn't seem to work with the wing-nuts on the Right.'

It's true, it seems the the MSM give DRAMATICALLY more airtime to the right-wing crazies than they ever did to the left-wing ones. It also seems that the more anyone tries to paint the Right with the 'birthers/tea-baggers' label, the more they seem to embrace it.

A couple weeks ago Ezra Klein had a great post on the asymmetrical coverage of political extremism. His point, the right gets coverage cause they want it. They ELECT their crazies, or at least their pols seem to embrace the crazies. You have Senator Grassley, former Vice-Presidential candidate and Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, and Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner all giving credibility to the 'death panel' lie, and countless other pols embracing the tea-baggers/birthers/town-hall nut-jobs. The MSM is justified in covering this, it's news when those three people say anything, let alone anything like the US government is planning to systematically euthanize the American elderly. It's like all the grown-ups have gone home and we're left with remnants of a once great party, it's just too bad we're still treating the Republicans like the party they once were, and not the party of crazies and obstructionists that they have become.