Lots of buzz this week over a Neo-Nazi in Indiana. The dimwit spray painted swastikas on a synagogue and burned up its yard. He claims he got radicalized first from his wife and then the internet. Buzzfeed and others originally claimed he got radicalized into Neo-Nazism by reading an Orthodox Jew you might have heard of named Ben Shapiro. That had to be walked back.

The story now, helpfully provided by the guy’s lawyer on why he shouldn’t have to go to jail, is that the wife watched Fox News and read Ben Shapiro and that all led the guy down the road to being a Neo-Nazi. In fact, the most telling piece from this Washington Post story is the “but.”

Shapiro is a leading conservative voice among millennials, a Harvard Law graduate with millions of social media followers. He has criticized President Trump but upholds many of the same views as the conservatives who support the president do — including outlawing abortion, repealing the Affordable Care Act and cutting taxes for the wealthy. He previously worked for Breitbart News.

You got that? Shapiro may have criticized the President, but he holds all those same views like tax cuts and being pro-life — just like those Neo-Nazis.

Good grief.

Here’s the thing though — the media has spent a great deal of time writing and talking about the extraordinary rise of white supremacy on the right and how right wing outlets are supposedly indoctrinating people.

They never did that with Floyd Lee Corkins. That’s the guy who decided to shoot up the Family Research Council after seeing them listed as a hate group on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website. Where’s the media exploration of that?

What about with James Hodgkinson. Hodgkinson decided to mass assassinate Republican members of congress at a baseball practice after hearing Bernie Sanders and a host of leftwing groups talk about how Republicans wanted to kill people.

There’s been little self-reflection from the press or analysis of leftwing indoctrination on those.

This goes all the way back though. Remember the guy who took hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters? Leftwing pundits and even some reporters speculated he had to be some right-winger upset about the Discovery Channel’s coverage of hot button issues like climate change. Turns out the guy was a nut who decided they weren’t doing enough to fight climate change. He was a radical leftist. The progressives and reporters speculating sent all their speculation down the memory hole once that came out.

If it was a one off thing, I think we could chalk it up to bias. But this isn’t one off. Time and time again, the media goes overboard in trying to tie radical alt-right figures to mainstream voices on the right while refusing to even point out obvious ties on the left. Hodgkinson and Corkins were both Facebook fans of the Southern Poverty Law Center and other leftwing groups. Were they fans of Fox News or Ben Shapiro we would have been treated to multiple days of coverage. But because they were fans of groups the media relies on, we did not get that.

And there is the problem. The media has gone beyond bias to willful, malicious partisanship. The very groups and voices that have radicalized multiple would be mass murderers on the left are those that get prime time slots on television and in newspapers to attack the right. For the media to cover this would require self-reflection and a level of recognition of the media’s own partisanship.

They’d rather attack Fox News and Ben Shapiro.