If you follow the right wing of the blogosphere and their complaints about media bias, you might find this interesting.
For those readers (both of you) who haven't heard yet, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was caught by the New York Times lying about having served in Vietnam. According to Big Journalism, "The Real Blumenthal Scandal is the Media".
It's really interesting to see how Big Journalism twists a story broke not by Fox News but by the paper conservatives love to hate into a story about the 'failure' of the liberal mainstream media. They even mention (once) that the New York Times broke the story, although they certainly speak no word of praise, and don't wonder why Fox News, or conservative bloggers (in Connecticut or elsewhere) missed it.
While they celebrate, the rest of us may learn several valuable lessons from this.
- Sometimes having paid reporters who concentrate on a single area and (yes) layers of editors and fact checkers does pay off. If the New York Times goes, they will be hard to replace - flaws and all.
- This is a story that bloggers could have broken, but didn't. There are some stories that require time, credentials, and expense accounts to break. This wasn't one of them. The true story of his past was no secret, had been reported in the press before. When a politician speaks about their past, especially when they say something they wouldn't dare lie about, it is worth checking up. If we don't have time to study the biographies of politicians, perhaps we could follow the speeches of some local politicians whose history we are familiar with.
- Liberals can always find a chuckle by browsing Breitbart's site.