After an informative look at the real biological meaning of the test findings that "led some media outlets to call her a 'hermaphrodite' (and some even more inaccurately calling her 'a woman … and a man')," Rogers writes that, to him,

Caster's story, however, is particularly poignant. She's only 18 years old. She only recently asserted her girly side on the cover of a magazine. More tragically, though, it's likely she had no idea about her sexual condition before today. Many intersex people don't learn about their biological history until well into their life, and the discovery can be predictably traumatic if not destructive. To make things worse, in Semenya's case, her discovery is being played out on an international stage, under the microscope of an ill-informed and often predatory press, while she's being faced with the knowledge that her career is likely to end.

If there’s an upside to the story, it’s that it’s likely to put intersex issues into the spotlight in a way that they’ve rarely been before. Unlike transgendered people (who benefited from films like Transamerica), intersex people haven’t had many great breakthroughs into mainstream culture.

But that's a pretty big if, considering corporate media's record of unenlightened gender reporting; see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Transforming Coverage: Transgender Issues Get Greater Respect—but Anatomy Remains Destiny" (11–12/07) by Julie Hollar.

reflective of one of the more irritating media syndromes: their tendency to talk about media coverage as though they have nothing to do with it and can't exert any influence over it; media coverage is just something that happens to them. During my interview with Todd a couple of months ago, he said:

Now you're getting--this has always been something that I've been--not to go off on a sidebar here--but I've been waiting for somebody, during the campaign, to ask both candidates. Because both of them, in the general elections, and frankly even during the primary with then Senator Clinton, all said that the Bush administration tried too hard to expand executive powers. And then you would say, which executive powers are you willing to give up? And none of them would actually say which executive powers, because once you're president you don't want to give up any of your powers.

He was "waiting for somebody" to ask the presidential candidates which executives powers they would relinquish. It's as though someone forgot to tell him he works at NBC News. It's very common for media stars to lament how the media covers petty stories or otherwise distorts them--as though someone is forcing them to do it and they have no agency.

Explaining that "if the right is better at 'creating media firestorms,' that's due to what 'the media does," Greenwald goes on to ask, "does anyone ever wonder why the right would be better at that if we had a Liberal Media?"

Calling the change "just the accountability-free nature of Beltway punditry," Greenwald also spies "a more important point highlighted here":

namely, it is a sign of how dysfunctional the Democratic Party is--and how meaningless is their glorious super-majority--that even the New Republic, which long prided itself on safeguarding the party from nefarious left-wing influences, is now calling for "centrist" Democratic senators (even including Joe Lieberman) to be thrown out of office by means of primary challenges (I believe that was once called a "purity purge"), even if doing so results in a loss of Democratic seats. [TNR editor Jonathan] Chait's rationale is that allowing "centrist" dominance within the party means that the same corporate interests (rather than the interests of constituents) and the same political agenda end up being served regardless of which party is in control, meaning that--as he put it--even "a filibuster-proof Democratic majority isn't worth having" because nothing meaningful changes. You don't say.

But, notes Greenwald, "that, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006." Those were "the people Chait demonized back then as 'left-wing fanatics' who 'refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.'"

Greenwald's present example is a new Politico and the Hill commentary in which Davis warns of "The Dangerous Joining of the Far Right and Far Left" and declares it "time for the vast center-left and center-right of this country to speak up and call them out" because "silence is no longer acceptable by responsible liberals towards the reckless far left or by responsible conservatives towards the reckless far right. Silence is complicity."

Greenwald breaks down this fraudulent balance, and Davis' true motivations for positing it:

As for the monsters of the Right, Davis lists "the shouters shouting down other people who wish to speak at town meetings, whacko 'birthers,' and liars inventing 'death panels' and obscenely and recklessly mentioning Adolph Hitler and Nazi symbols to scare people." And who are the equivalents on the Left? The people who do this:

on the far left--including the most vicious posters on the so-called liberal blogosphere, threatening businesses with one or more executives who offer personal ideas for achieving national health care reform different from the Administration's or Democratic congressional leaders' versions (full disclosure: I support all of President Obama's core principles for national health care legislation, though I still have many unanswered questions); hateful e-mails, phone calls, blogs, and personal attacks, distorting alternative ideas different from the Administration's approach and attacking the motives of those airing them.

Plainly, this whole rant has no purpose other than to argue that "the Left" is as bad as the screaming, gun-wielding right-wing townhall Limbaugh followers.

So surely it's just coincidence that "some progressives, in the wake of [Whole Foods CEO John] Mackey's anti-health-care-reform Op-Ed, organized a boycott of Whole Foods, Davis' client." Greenwald explains how "that's all Davis means when he complains of 'threatening businesses'": "they're harming the business interests of my paid client."