text: I confess I paid little attention to ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin’s memo to his staff until a friend reminded me to look late last night. I did a double take. Are these people actually paid to do this? Even if journalism school (or whatever training Halperin took) is essentially meaningless, you would think that, after Rathergate, basic common sense would dictate you didn’t put nonsense like this on paper, even internally:
  The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done.
  Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.
  We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don’t warrant that.
  Oolala. Talk about arrogance and bon chic bon genre… not even the pretense of journalistic even-handedness is made. It’s almost self-parody. In fact, it is. Allow me to be blunt. These buffoons of the mainstream media as presently conceived must be upended and destroyed, their objectivity be revealed as the farce that it is. They are writers of fiction – and bad fiction at that. Strike that. Make that horrendous boring propaganda worthy of this building.