Not much to add to this, and apologies if this has been covered already (I did a search! Honest!) but Greg Sargent's recent blog post is like a breath of fresh air:
This doesn’t happen every day, but good for the Los Angeles Times for calling out the ubiquitous falsehood about Obama supposedly waiving welfare reform’s work requirement right in its headline:
Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama
[...]
I didn’t expect this, but the epic dishonesty of Romney’s campaign is finally prompting something of a debate among media types about whether what we’re seeing here is unprecedented — and how to appropriately respond to it.
No doubt the media's been giving a largely free pass (to favored ideologies) a long time now, but to me it feels like it's really been dialed-up since the late 90s. Hopefully this is a sign that we're starting to return from
wondering whether the media has an obligation to the truth to a place where journalism can be about journalism again.