Are you now

Hugh Hewitt has a fairly revealing piece this morning calling for reporters to answer a short questionnaire.

What questions would I like answered? Very simple ones: For whom did the reporter vote for president in the past five elections?  Do they attend church regularly and if so, in which denomination?  Do they believe that the late-term abortion procedure known as partial birth abortion should be legal? Do they believe same sex marriage ought to be legal?  Did they support the invasion of Iraq?  Do they support drilling in ANWR?

If I know the answers to those ten questions, I can quickly decide what degree of trust with which to approach a reporter’s reporting.  Even “low trust” reporters can earn trust, of course, but degrees of suspicion are a fact of life.  Only MSM pretends otherwise, and bloggers have exposed that pretension as the fiction it really is, even if most of MSM want to continue the charade.

Got that? His degree of trust in any given reporter depends on whether or not they believe same sex marriage should be legal. It depends on whether or not they support drilling for oil in ANWR. It depends on not only their church-going habits, but what denomination they belong to. Unitarian Universalists need not apply?

He sets up for the list of questions by noting that everyone brings baggage to the reporting of the news, and thus argues that if you’re not willing to reveal that baggage, you’re untrustworthy. But then he makes the jump to asserting that it’s not just the revelation of the baggage that matters, it’s what the baggage is. It’s not “if those ten questions are answered,” it’s “the answers to those ten questions.” This is no more and no less than an ideological-based test for reporters, and it’s disgusting.