David Broder is supposed to be the gold standard for unbiased coverage. The Washington Post Writers Group describes his columns as "Balanced perspective on politics and government from one of the greatest journalists of our day."

Talking Points feels that a panel with Broder, two conservatives, and a liberal is unbalanced.

Which is why I am upset with Sunday's column, "The Media, Losing Their Way". In an apparent effort to be fair and balanced, opened with this:

In a year when war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism and looming problems with the federal budget and the nation's health care system cry out for serious debate, the news organizations on which people should be able to depend have been diverted into chasing sham events: a scurrilous and largely inaccurate attack on the Vietnam service of John Kerry and a forged document charging President Bush with disobeying an order for an Air National Guard
physical.

This bothers me on several levels. The SwiftVets made charges substantiated by official documentation and sworn affidavits. After two months of digging, the most that anyone has managed is a childish "my eyewitnesses count for more than your eyewitnesses." I know of no uncritical coverage in the mainsteam media (MSM). The story was not covered at all for the first month until Kerry decided to fight back. Dismissive comments like Broders are widespread.

The CBS story, on the other hand, was broken by the MSM and then picked up by campaign ads. It has been discredited and CBS had to apologies for it.

So why does Broder use the SwiftVets as scurrilous? He didn't add any such terms on the CBS forgeries.

Later he says:

The common feature -- and the disturbing fact -- is that none of these damaging failures would have occurred had senior journalists not been blind to the fact that the standards in their organizations were being fatally compromised

Again - where is the MSM coverage of the SwiftVets that he is complaining about? I would love to see it.

Time was when any outfit such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that came around peddling an ad with implausible charges would have run into a hard-nosed reporter whose first questions -- before he or she ran with the story -- would have been, "Who the hell are you guys? What's your angle? What's your proof?"

These guys are a large group of Swift Boat and other Viet Nam veterans. Their angle is that they have not forgiven Kerry for his 1971 anti-war protests. They have documented their charges extensively.

And for a final time, where is the coverage of the SwiftVets? Is he only talking about paid ads? Does he mean that some hard-nosed reporter should have gone out and investigated the charges? Tried to disprove them?

If Broder is surprised that this hasn't happened, so am I. The Washington Post found that some SwiftVets backers also have backed Republicans. This is not much of an inditement. Surely they didn't expect that the Kerry backers were funding the ads?

But in the two months since the ads started showing, not one person has been able to prove a substantial charge was false. Yes, "all of the enlisted men who served under Kerry who were on the same boat when the actions happened back him". And an officer who was in the same boat, an enlisted man who served under Kerry but not during the incidents, and several people who were yards away say otherwise. This is not proof.

There might be some proof in Kerry's official records. The ones he hasn't released. Why hasn't he released them.

But, let's look at it the other way. Surveys have shown that the press overwhelmingly wants Kerry to win. Any reporter who disproved and of the SwiftVets' claims would get a national byline. There must be dozens of reporters out there digging. Why haven't we seen anything?

Maybe because it is all true. Things start looking bad for Kerry and they quit digging. They don't want to see any more. After all, Viet Nam was a long time ago and the important thing is getting Kerry into office. Right?

So while David Broder talks about lowered news standards and the bad influence of internet "journalists", he is overlooking the real story. The press is biased.

CBS is biased. They found the story that they had spent five years searching for and they didn't check it because they needed it to be true. They needed to save us from Bush.

If Broder had spent an hour checking the SwiftVets' charges he would never have used the words "scurrilous and largely inaccurate". He doesn't because he already knows everything he needs to about Kerry (i.e. he isn't Bush). And Broder lumps together inconvenient charges against Kerry and outright forgeries as though the two were equally wrong. Broder's biases are showing.

At least Talking Points can rest easy, the panel had two liberals, after all.