Krugman: " 'Balance' Not Always 'Truth' "

Here's a few paragraphs from Paul Krugman's column today, A False Balance, which speaks to how the right wing spinmeisters, under the guise of insisting on fair and objective "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" journalistic practice, have succeeded in gulling the Washington Post and The Today Show, among others, into reporting the Abramoff scandal as a standard (and demonstrably untrue) "pox on both their houses" narrative wherein both parties accepted money from Abramoff.

...(snip)
...over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post's ombudsman to the "Today" show's Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn't given a penny to Democrats.
...(snip)

There have been both bipartisan and purely Democratic scandals in the past. Based on everything we know so far, however, the Abramoff affair is a purely Republican scandal.

Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn't. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.
...(snip)

So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It's not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.

Waking from its recent slumbers, The Times also in an editorial yesterday put the lie to George "Divine Right" Bush's "Would You Rather Die Or What" justification for warrantless domestic spying, laying out clearly and in abundant detail the cynical methods employed by this most cynical of regimes to put another lie over on the American people.