Cherry picking

It's impossible to tell what's actually going on anymore.

Fox is hammering on Obama's connection to Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, while (most) other news outlets seem concerned with the report of Palin's "abuse of power" in the "Troopergate" firing in Alaska (by the way, and I'm sure Bill Maher's already hit on this in his "New Rules" segments, but can we quit naming scandals with this "-gate" scheme? Watergate was actually the NAME OF THE HOTEL!). Meanwhile, Obama's supporters have dismissed the allegations of the candidate's connection with Ayers, just as Fox and the GOPers have already begun minimizing the significance of the Palin fiasco.

Examples of the different responses:

On the Huffington Post this morning, a headshot of Palin is accompanied by huge, red "Drudge Report" style headlines screeching the news that the probe has found her "guilty of abuse of power."

On National Review Online's The Corner, editor Kathryn Jean Lopez posted under "Confused" that she's puzzled by the furor over the report, since Palin apparently didn't do anything illegal.

Townhall.com's Hugh Hewitt ignored the Palin debacle and drew more attention to the Obama-Ayers connection, which is what some of the Corner posters are talking about this morning.

And that's just three major blogs. There are plenty more.

So if the media were bad before, they're worse now -- blogs, of course, have always led the charge, and now there are so many of them on either side that people can read enough of one angle to feel like they've actually got a clear picture of what's going on. Well, if all you read is Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, and National Review, you haven't gotten a well-rounded picture. The same goes if you spend all day on the Huffington Post and DailyKos.

Me, I have some reading to get done for my world politics seminar Monday (although not much, since we didn't get to much of what I'd read already last week), but in the meantime, I'm going to put together another cheesy horror movie live-blog. That'll probably be forthcoming later today.

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