Manchurian Reporters

As Bob Somerby aptly put it on Friday, "[t]his past week has featured some world-class press corps clowning."

And it just keeps getting worse.

In response to Joe Lieberman's primary loss and the news of the foiled British terror plot, a number of our elite scribes have written stories that you would swear had to have been written by someone at the RNC. One of the worst offenders was Time's Mike Allen, whose clowning Bob Somerby picks apart in this post.

Lindsay Beyerstein highlights another repeat offender, the New York Times' Adam Nagourney.

But for my money, the worst offender of the week is Nagourney's colleague, Jim Rutenberg. Here are the first five paragraphs of Rutenberg's "news analysis" in Today's Times:

One week ago, President Bush and his political aides were
facing the most daunting election-year landscape of his
presidency.

Their party was splintered over Mr. Bush’s proposed
immigration overhaul and uncertain about the political
effect of violence in Iraq. Even with the White House
working to bring Republicans together behind the
president’s agenda, several candidates were making
public shows of establishing their distance from him
and his sagging approval ratings.

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically
this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator
Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in
Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had
foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used
those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying
the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national
security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer
home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

By the time the president’s top political strategists met at
his ranch on Friday for an annual summer fund-raiser, the
events had given them an opportunity to pull together the
Republican Party as it headed toward the home stretch of
the campaign, rallying once more around Mr. Bush’s
signature issue, the fight against terrorism.

Rutenberg eventually goes on to quote a few Democrats, but good grief--if Karl Rove could have personally penned those five paragraphs, would he have even changed a word?

Liberal bias my arse.