Girl Talk is ostensibly one of the more successful DJs of the past decade, embarking on countless college tours, becoming a staple on the festival circuit, and putting out five well-received albums of frenetic cut-and-paste mash-ups. He’s certainly nowhere near being a household name, but putting the words “Girl Talk” and “mash-up” right next to each other should be enough to have a lot of people at least check Google to see why that would ring a bell.

Not so for Mark Finkelstein, an editor for the website NewsBusters, whose goal (according to them) is “exposing and combating liberal media bias.” On Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was discussing ISIS with a guest on his talk show when he said the following: “In the last 13 years since September 11, there have been occasional stories of this type. Sort of, a kind of Girl Talk mash-up of the fear about the border and the fear about terrorism being fused together into this story…”

Finkelstein missed out on the cultural reference, put on his white hat, and took to his website to attack Hayes for what he perceived as a media injustice. “Paging the MSNBC PC police!” Finkelstein proclaimed. “On his All In show this evening, Chris Hayes used some decidedly un-PC language to dismiss concerns that ISIS or other terrorist groups might be infiltrating across our porous southern border.” He went on to call Hayes out for using such a “frankly unfeminist phrase” and demanded that the news anchor should be sent “off to the re-education camp.”

Except, of course, it was just an innocent reference to a mash-up DJ best known for his sweaty live shows, and certainly not some sexist jab. When commenters on the Newsbusters website pointed this out, Finkelstein added this non-apologetic correction:

UPDATE: Reader Tom E. has brought to my attention that “Girl Talk” is the name of a DJ who specializes in mashups. I’d surmise that, like me, most Hayes viewers didn’t get the cultural reference and took “girl talk” at face value.

Watch the video of Hayes’ Girl Talk shoutout below and revisit GT’s most recent full-length mash-up album, All Day, which came out all the way back in 2010. (He also had a great EP with rapper Freeway earlier this year.)

(via Gawker)

[Photo by Alex Crick/Stereogum.]