1 The NYT joined the club long before. They didn't coin the term "truthiness," they made it their operating philosophy. Examples? "Bush Lied" when EVERY one of the principals in the Dem party said the same things during the Clinton administration. What ever happened to all the 'facts' they laid out linking Cheney, Rove, and Bush with the Plame leak? Why didn't the NYT pick up on the obvious inconsistencies in the Kerry testimony to Congress in the early 70's? (That Nixon couldn't have sent him to Cambodia on Christmas eve 1968, because Nixon wasn't in the White House until mid-January 1969, for example.) When did the NYTs make their case against "Swift Boating" ? They use the term now to imply lying against the facts, when only Kerry changed those said 'facts." Why did the NYTs offer THREE different takes on what Kerry was supposed to have said with that 'botched joke" speech before those students? Shouldn't there be only ONE transcript of a speech you're giving? And so on . . . Saying that a woman is sitting in jail because she had an abortion in El Salvador (when she really is sitting in jail because she smothered her infant in his crib after birth) just helps make their point. That point is that El Salvador is not a Socialist paradise like Cuba or Venezuela. And every urbane thinking person knows that. Heck, El Salvador is even linked with Ronald Reagan. Ad you know what THAT means!

2 Yeah. It's just that I don't like to think I'm only "preaching to the choir," so I like to use sources that my lefty/lib readers and I can agree are likely to get the reporting part of it sort-of correct. But there are fewer and fewer of them as more of these guys get caught with their pants down. I know we live in a world in which each point of view essentially has its own media sources, but I'm not real happy about it. I wish there were a few honest pro journalists left in the MSM. I mean, I know there are, but they are obviously a rare breed.

3 Shamelessly swiped from Nexus Magazine's website (yeah I know -- sort of an extremist outfit, but the quote is good) : One night, probably in 1880, John Swinton, then the preeminent New York journalist, was the guest of honour at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying: "There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. "The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." (Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)

4 Yeah. Intellectual prostitutes (or, in some cases, anti-intellectual ones)--though possibly from another direction now vs. back then.