HispanicBusiness

Led by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, conservatives are accusing the mainstream media of ignoring the story about Van Jones, the Obama administration's green jobs "czar" who resigned this weekend amid right-wing uproar over his past statements.

"Just in case your only source of news is ABC, CBS, and NBC or the New York Times or the Washington Post or, as the White House was hoping, you were out doing things over the long weekend with your family, you didn't check the news at all, which was released after midnight on Sunday, so it wouldn't be in any papers, the green jobs czar, special advisor to the president, Van Jones, has resigned," Beck said on his show Tuesday.

To recap, Jones is the co-founder and erstwhile member of the group Color of Change, which organized a successful advertiser boycott of Beck's show last month after Beck called Obama "racist." (Jones hadn't been a member for two years.)

Not long after the Color of Change campaign began, Beck produced a show dedicated to painting Jones as a radical, saying, for instance, that he showed up for his first day at Yale University in combat boots "and holding a Black Panther book bag."

Further dredging turned up past controversial comments. They include a quote from Jones in the East Bay Express in 2005 describing his response to the 1992 acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King beating.

"I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," Jones told the alternative weekly near San Francisco. "By August, I was a communist."

Last week, Jones -- a renowned environmental activist -- issued apologies for calling Republicans a--holes in a February address, as well as for signing a petition suggesting that former President George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks before they occurred.

On Monday, Fox News reported that "there was no mention of Jones by CBS, NBC, ABC, The Washington Post or The New York Times on Wednesday -- the night Jones' first issued an apology for past statements. The same was true on Thursday, although a Washington Post blog picked up the story."

The statement isn't entirely accurate: On Thursday, ABC News posted a story on its Web site. But the New York Times didn't report on the story until Jones resigned Sunday.

On the other side of the fence, Huffington Post contributor Joseph A. Palermo likened Beck's treatment of Jones to McCarthyism, in which U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy used people's past words and affiliations against them to stir up a Communist scare.

Palermo pointed out that the left did not mobilize the ouster of Bush appointees for past damning remarks. As an example he cited federal Judge James Leon Holmes, who once wrote that "the wife is to subordinate herself to her husband" and "(c)oncern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami."

"Miami saw snow once in a hundred years; there were 32,000 women who became pregnant by rape the year Holmes wrote this drivel," Holmes writes. "If you serve a right-wing Republican president you can write or say anything you want, even be connected to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (C of CC). But if you serve a liberal Democratic president, like the 'pinks' who fell victim McCarthyism, you can be taken down in a heartbeat."