You mean *another* major media source being hoodwinked by *another* unscrupulous correspondant. As to "no right/leftness", you've got to be kidding.

If they've got you looking for "right/leftness" in everything you see, then you're a slave to the ping-pong game, destined forever to vote "against" rather than "for" in every election, destined forever to be a willing participant in the contrived, superficial competition between "them" and "them" . . .

The lefty-rightyness of it comes from the MSM being 90% lefty*. So they didn't remove smoke from the photo. They didn't put the soldier in a less menacing position. They didn't find a memo that said Bush fulfilled his National Guard duty. And it's the righty blogs that fact-checked their ass.


*as a centrist i am the final arbiter on this factoid

Like this: New study detects media's liberal tilt which supposedly "scientifically proves" this idea that the "MSM" is "90% lefty" . . . "...the authors start by examining the ratings of members of Congress, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)..." I tried to keep reading after that...and I don't really know who ADA is, or have any reason to think they swing one way or the other . . . but this isn't science. This subject isn't something that can be scientifically studied. It's like "scientifically" debating whether God exists without establishing a definition of what God even means. You can't base science on the shifting sands of perception . . . what does "liberal" mean exactly? Putting alot of gravy, a "liberal" amount on your mashed potatoes? that debate would be based on source data from Americans For Tasty Side Dishes (ATSD) - but the catch is the source data isn't scientific data!

And it's our old relativist friend "moral equivalance" again...

I don't have to "look for right-leftness in everything" when it comes to the MSM: it's honestly and clearly already there. It's being blind to it that's your problem, which causes you to think there's nothing to it.

You really beleive Reuters is politically neutral? You need to broaden your news sources beyond BBC, CNN and NPR.

No, I just opt out of the "left versus right" mudslinging because I find it counter-productive to any meaningful dialogue.

That's quite a confession of ignorance for someone who wants to argue about right vs. left.

My entire point is that I don't want to argue about left versus right.

How could you have missed that?

I too want to escape the usual he-said-she-said of what is considered mainstream politics, because the bogus debate is hurting America (ref Jon Stewart re Crossfire) and is tedious.

But I can't help but notice that everyone has a bias, a narrative on what happened, everyone is in schools of thought which influence their point of view.

I would like them to admit the bias so that I can sort of triangulate on the truth. But they don't admit it, so I am left to work it out myself. What a pain in the ass!

I don't think that you can declare allegience to an unspecified category, if that makes sense. The problem here is the fallacy of impartiality: we are all biased, as human beings. But trying to lump us into two clean groups is just plain silly.

I honestly don't think anyone who had actually seen this photo (IE did their job) could have possibly published it on purpose, or expected nobody to notice that it looks like it was doctored with Microsoft Paint.

Your argument is that right vs. left is irrelevant. You can't do that intelligently without knowing what it is you're dismissing.

I'm dismissing the notion that we can be so easily manipulated by an "us versus them" distraction when the two "sides" agree on 99% of the things that are really going to matter in the long run. It's worse than "east coast versus west coast" - but in this case, it isn't just rap albums that are for sale.

This is the blindness that sets in that causes you to see what you want to see. How could anybody have failed to notice that the Rathergate memos were produced with Microsoft Word?

There's really more than two sides, and the differences between them *are* significant. You can't elucidate the underlying principles and values by just watching the behavior of politicians; they're constrained to the normative forces of the election process.

Nor can you ignore the underlying biases of any news source just because you find today's rhetoric and lack of comity distasteful; you have to factor in those biases when interpreting their reporting.