Over the weekend, I wondered why the mainstream media was ignoring some amazing stories of pro-life activists and evangelical disabled advocates who have been peacefully keeping vigil outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice.

Michelle Cottle of The New Republic, who appeared on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, provides some candid insight into the bigoted mindset of the MSM that explains their focus on the religious extremists and their apathy towards peaceful people of faith who don’t fit the MSM caricature:

[HOWARD] KURTZ: Michelle Cottle, has the press ridiculed, or maybe I should say marginalized, religious people who believed the Terri Schiavo must be kept alive as a matter of Christian morality?

COTTLE: Well, it’s not that they get out there and make fun of them. It’s just you come with a ready-made kind of visual here. You have people on the streets praying. They’re, you have very dramatic and even melodramatic protests and things like this.

These people are very easy to kind of just poke fun at without even saying anything. You just kind of show these people. And the majority of Americans who don’t get out there and do this kind of, you know, really dramatic displays feel a little bit uncomfortable on that level.

Here are some of “these people” who Cottle finds so easy to “poke fun at:”

Keep these images–and Cottle’s revealing statement–in mind as the MSM hypes the story of a small minority of agitators disturbing the peace down in Pinellas Park.

Oh, and if Cottle is willing to be this honest on national TV about her discomfort with people praying on the street, can you imagine what her colleagues in newsrooms and control rooms across the country are saying about “these people?”

Update: In an alternate universe, Jeff Jarvis excoriates the media for supposedly pandering to the “religious right:”

The religious right is separating itself from the rest of America. The theocrats may have finally gone too far too often.

They have been aided and abetted — but ultimately undermined — by a media that bought their PR and presented the loud voices of a few as the voice of the nation marching to the right and up to the altar.

“Aided and abetted” by the MSM? Are you kidding me? Jeff Jarvis, meet Michelle Cottle. The undermining is no accident.

Hugh Hewitt reacts to Jarvis’s post here.

More at Right Wing Nuthouse.

Update II: Here’s a Washington Post story for Tuesday’s edition by Dana Milbank, dripping with contempt for and mockery of those weirdo Christians, that proves my point–and Cottle’s.