Oh dear. I seem inadvertently to have fallen into a transatlantic cultural and linguistic divide with my line about Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, being a “chirpy gay liberal” in my column this week.
Those three words were picked out by the Huffington Post (you can’t trust the media) and set off a firestorm of protest among its indignant readers. I have also received quite a lot of fierce emails accusing me of insensitivity, homophobia, stupidity, jealousy, ignorance etc.
The last time I looked, there were 500 comments on HuffPo and some of them were not very nice about me. In view of this, and the comments on my blog item below, perhaps I ought to provide some explanation.
The truth is that I did not think about it much. I wanted a quick description of Ms Maddow, since she is the newest of the television talk show hosts whom I mentioned, and the phrase seemed to sum up her brand for those living outside the US.
