Noting Fox News anchor Shepard Smith’s denunciation of conservatives who oppose gay marriage “for being on the wrong side of history,” Maggie Gallagher questions Fox’s impartiality on the issue:

Fox News stopped covering marriage victories years ago. I personally noticed it during the November 2009 elections when CNN and MSNBC gave plenty of airtime to the Maine referendum where voters successfully repealed gay marriage— but on Fox? Nothing. Did not exist.

(No, I don’t know why Fox News is so reluctant to provide fair and balanced coverage of a major development on marriage, unless it’s on the pro–gay-marriage side.)

This is nothing new. Talking with a Fox staffer about covering the 2002 Catholic bishops’ meeting in Dallas, the first one in the wake of the sex abuse scandal, I brought up one important aspect of the story: the role homosexual networks within the seminaries and the Catholic clergy have played in the cover-ups. It’s not the entire story, but you couldn’t really understand the whole complex story without an appreciation of this factor. The mainstream media never covers it, but I, who was a lot more naive then, told a Fox staffer with whom I was speaking about it (I was a National Review writer at that time) that I was glad that Fox would be present in Dallas to shed some light on a dramatically undercovered aspect of this enormously important story. We had been writing about it as part of our coverage in NR, but it had been ignored by the mainstream media.

The staffer said its Dallas team had been told not to touch anything to do with homosexuality and the abuse scandal.

“But you can’t tell the whole story unless you do!” I protested.

The staffer did not disagree, but said that this was policy handed down from the very top of the network. No names were mentioned.

I should be clear that I have no idea how Fox covers the gay marriage issue. I don’t watch TV news. That’s what happened 10 years ago, though. For what it’s worth. I don’t know why the network that’s supposed to appeal to conservatives would ignore or downplay an issue of great importance to conservatives. I don’t know why it was decided a decade ago to ignore this issue in its coverage of the Church abuse scandal.