Remember why we Americans in general and bloggers in particular are obsessed with media dishonesty and inaccuracy. That election over which Orin expresses concern cannot be expected to conclude fairly or peacefully if a major media outlet is carelessly reporting a fraud passed to them. The power of the media in political affairs is a given. The responsibility that
the media have in these affairs is unenforceable.
As far as I am concerned there is prima facie that the memos are frauds. Consequently the network that relies on these memos should answer challenges to their validity, and challenges to their fairness in other reporting about the memos' subject as well.
If true, their errors need to be detected and corrected, and I'd rather have bloggers doing it than Congress or the courts.
If false---if the influence of the network media is diminshing, and that of decentralized media is increasing---media consumers are making it so, and should articulate why.
Either way, I don't see this as a matter distracting the body politic from the truly salient issues of a presidential election. I see this as a message to the body politic to be aware of the curvature of the lens through which they view the election, and to either correct that lens or discard it if they feel it cannot be trusted.
The only way to do that, within Constitutional constraints, is to point out the distortions, in painful detail, over and over and over, right now. It will not interfere with discussion of genuine campaign issues, it can only help.
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