Blogoland

Because one of the nation's alleged top newsmagazines just gave up on its reason for being. On C-SPAN, today, the monkeys and me saw Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor at Newsweek, discussing the 2004 election [the event was on Jan. 10, at DC's Politics & Prose No videotape]. One of the questioners asked Thomas whether he thought the press, in the course of fact-checking claims made by campaigns, should pay specific attention to the sheer mendacity of wild claims-- in other words, eliminate the false equivalencey of "They both lie!" and get to the heart of it. Especially, in light of the fact that in this past election, GOP untruths swamped Democrat fibs.

Thomas's response? [This is a paraphrase, but pretty close to the spirit] "Well, that's a fair question, but we get hammered so much for bias anyway, we don't really want to exacerbate the problem by giving them more fuel for the fire."

Evan, time to hand in your pen.