I am a conservative, I am a Republican, I am a former journalist, I have unwaveringly supported the war in Iraq, and I usually disagree with your analyses and opinions. I won't go into detail, because that's not the point of this note; I just wanted to provide some context, to emphasize this issue is nonpartisan.

I could not possibly agree with you more on this, and I thank you for writing it. The only thing I'd say is that you're not quite going far enough. You almost make it seem like we should be skeptical because of past wrongdoings, because the media has proven itself untrustworthy.

I appreciate your comment and I agree with what you go on to say. I want to be very clear that the methods I'm criticizing here are ones that make me discount media stories when they undermine the political views I have and -- just as much -- when they bolster them.

The day after Ross published the Iran nuclear story, he published another story claiming that various militias in Pakistan are responsible for terrorist attacks inside Iran - aimed at Iran's government - and that such groups are assisted by the Bush administration.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's true. And if it were true, I would definitely write about it, since I do think that the administration is doing all sorts of things - without any oversight - to provoke Iran into a conflict. But I didn't write about that story, and wouldn't rely on it, because the sourcing was so unclear and sketchy, and I just won't run off excitedly touting a single story based on sketchy sources that we know nothing about -- even if the story could be used to bolster a point I think is important.

Admittedly not all, but definitely most, of these media criticisms are "non-partisan," in the sense that they do not amount to a demand that journalists promote any partiuclarly viewpoint. Instead, they are geared towards shoddy jouranlistic methods they use which produce factually inaccurate and highly biased accounts.

we have huge media conglomerates in this country with journalists, reporters, pundits and anchor people who get paid a hell of alot more many than you (I imagine) and yet they can't bring themselves to look back on the VERY THINGS THEY REPORTED less than ten years ago.

This is what happened: I hadn't been paying close attention to the whole Pelosi/headscarf/Syria hysteria because I've been working on other things the past few days. So I started reading around on it today and wondered whether Newt Gingrich had ever made a similar trip during the Clinton years (expecting that he had, given how he basically spent those years parading around, as I said, like the Prime Minister).

So I went to Google, entered "Gingrich foreign trip controversy" or something similar, and right away those NYT articles came up on his China trip. When I read them, they were so obviously relevant to the current controversy - I'm not saying they're completely show-stopping, but that incident clearly is similar --- that I was absolutely sure that it must have been mentioned by media reports.

So before I posted anything, I searched everywhere, not wanting to post something that's already been around, and I found nothing. That's when I posted it.

As you say, most of the journalists who covered that story are still journalists. Even if they are super slothful and don't do research, you would think at least one of them would remember what they reported on, make the connection in their brains, and then mention it. Yet they don't. It's like they can only see what is immediately in front of their faces and nothing else.

I had that same thought when the whole Executive

Privilege/U.S. Attorney controversy recently arose -- so many of the reporters covering that now were the ones covering Clinton's executive privilege assertions and the controversies it generated, yet it never occurred to any of them to go back and see what was being said at the time, or if it did, I guess they don't think things like that promote their function, however each of them perceive it.