As we noted yesterday, Media Matters pointed out that a Nazi-era antisemitic cartoon had been used as an illustration at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Journalism” website on at least three occasions in the past year: Andrew Breitbart’s ‘Big Journalism’ Bloggers Use Antisemitic Nazi-Era Cartoon.

It’s fascinating to see how controversies like this are handled in the right wing blogs these days. Instead of saying she’s sorry for publishing such a thing (more than once!), the response from Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch is to immediately go on the attack against the people who pointed it out — and refuse to issue even the slightest hint of an apology: Media Matters, Desperate to Deflect From Charges of Antisemitism, Trumps up Attack on Big Journalism - Big Journalism.

On Dec. 15, 2011, t 10:02 p.m. EST, Media Matters for America’s Kevin Zieber posted a blog criticizing the use of a graphic in a post at Big Journalism that, Zieber argued, was reminiscent of a cartoon that appeared in antisemitic propaganda in the 1930s.

Wow. “Zieber argued” that the graphic was “reminiscent” of a Nazi-era cartoon? Let’s see if this is an accurate way to describe the situation; here are the two images side by side, with Big Journalism’s slightly modified version on the left and the Nazi version on the right:

That’s pretty “reminiscent,” all right. “Reminiscent” as in “identical,” except for slightly straightening the nose and replacing the Star of David with the words “Media Bias.”

There’s no apology coming from Loesch or from publisher Andrew Breitbart, though. Instead, Loesch claims they had already figured it out themselves before the Media Matters article appeared. There’s no way to check her claim, of course.

Approximately seven hours before that–well before we had received any complaints, but after Big Journalism post was published–Breitbart editor-in-chief Joel Pollak noticed the graphic, and alerted me that he suspected it was a recycled anti-Jewish cartoon. (He’s an Orthodox Jew with a degree in Jewish Studies, so he tends to pick up on these things.) He hadn’t seen the image before, but he had suspicions, and asked that we take the image down and stop using it in future. It had been used innocently, without knowledge of the provenance of the image. Nevertheless, it was replaced in the article almost immediately.

This is the state of right wing journalism; they repeatedly publish a Nazi-era antisemitic cartoon, then don’t even apologize to their readers for it. Instead they attack, deny, and distort the facts to try to distract attention away from their own failings.

They’re a lot like spoiled children, really. Spoiled children who “accidentally” re-publish Third Reich propaganda.