Slanted Press or Slanted Blogs?

"The real House GOP problem isn't about lobbyists so much as it is the atrophying of its principles. As their years in power have stretched on, House Republicans have become more passionate about retaining power than in using that power to change or limit the federal government. Gathering votes for serious policy is difficult and tends to divide a majority. Re-election unites them, however, so the leadership has gradually settled for raising money on K Street and satisfying Beltway interest groups to sustain their incumbency.

"This strategy has maintained a narrow majority, but at the cost of doing anything substantial."

Scandals come and go, but K Street always rules.

I'm still hung up on the fiasco at the West Virginia mine, which I wrote about yesterday. Almost every journalist I've interviewed or seen interviewed says it wasn't the media's fault, we did the best we could, yadda yadda yadda. But there are a couple of exceptions, such as the Orlando Sentinel, as noted by ombudsman Manning Pynn :

"The Sentinel apologized on Thursday's front page for a headline and article in that space the day before, quoting relatives of 13 trapped West Virginia coal miners as saying, 'They're alive!' . . .

"The newspaper owed its readers that apology -- not because it generated, or even contributed to generating, the incorrect information. The apology was for delivering to readers information that misled them in a very prominent way about a very emotional issue."

At Raleigh's News & Observer, ombud Ted Vaden says:

"Let's concede to begin with that it was an awful error. To publish bad information of this magnitude is an editor's worst nightmare, and you can imagine the dismay of The N&O's top editors when they awoke to the real story Wednesday morning."

And USA Today took responsibility by running an editor's note:

"This documentation proved inadequate and fell short of USA TODAY's professional standards . . . USA TODAY regrets the errors."

Here's how not to win friends in the press, according to London's Guardian :

"American troops in Baghdad on Sunday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.