To hear them, you'd think the Washington press corps consisted mainly of liberal versions of
cyber-gossip Matt Drudge. The White House's petulance over a Talk magazine photo spread
satirizing the Bush twins as expensively dressed super-models behind bars is a case in point.

    I heard GOP stalwarts on a KARN talk show a few Sundays back whining about a "double standard."
Well, sorry, boys, but drunk jokes have been a staple of humor since Chaucer. A good way for the Bush twins
to stay out of the tabloids would be to stay out of bars and quit getting busted. If Chelsea had ever gotten
hauled downtown, they'd have had to take a fire hose to GOP moralist Bill Bennett to stop him ranting
about the Clintons' permissive parenting.

    As for bias, the media watchdog group FAIR--Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting--recently did a
revealing study of the Fox New Channel vs. CNN. They simply counted the party affiliations of guests
on Fox's bellwether news-chat show, "Special Report With Brit Hume," and CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports."

    On Fox, owned by right-wing media magnate Rupert Murdoch, a total of 56 partisan guests appeared
between January and May 2001. There were 50 Republicans and six Democrats. Overall, the Fox guest list
was also 91 percent male and 93 percent white. Seven of the eight women guests were Republicans,
as were five of the six non-whites.

    Over at CNN, often derided as the "Clinton News Network" by conservatives, things were different.
Of Blitzer's "partisan guests," FAIR's Steven Rendall found, "38 were Republicans and 29 were Democrats
--a 57-to-43 percent split in favor of Republicans." On Blitzer's show, a mere 83 percent of the guests were men;
93 percent white. Of the women, nine of 15 were Republicans, although four of five non-white guests were
Democrats, which pretty much accords with political reality.

    Numbers aren't everything, but they do tell the story here. Remember them next time you hear a
conservative praise Fox as a model of objectivity. Fox News is Republican news, period.

    If you want a really sad example of media irresponsibility, however, check out Roger Parloff's article in
the latest Brill's Content about my friend Sid Blumenthal's libel suit against the aforementioned Matt Drudge.
On Aug. 10, 1997, Drudge posted an item on his infamous Web site the very night before Sid started work
at the White House claiming that court records documented "Blumenthal's violence against his wife."
The allegation was categorically false; to my knowledge, Blumenthal has never raised his hand to his wife
Jacqueline, nor to any other woman. No court records ever existed.

    Furious, Blumenthal and his wife filed suit. Drudge quickly retracted and apologized, but the damage was done.
Suspecting she was in "denial," Jackie Blumenthal said, well-meaning friends and strangers approached her about
her life as an abused spouse.

    "It made my ears ring, my head swell, my stomach turn over, my heart beat too fast," she said in a 1998 deposition.
    Sid thought that if he simply accepted an apology, the lie would haunt him forever. He also doubted that Drudge
had simply invented the tale, despite his well-advertised scorn for stodgy journalistic ethics. He suspected a
"dirty tricks" operation aimed at ruining him and hurting Bill Clinton.

    Often derided for his shrewd understanding of right-wing methods, Blumenthal turned out to be right.
Witnesses told of a 1994 dinner party at a conservative function during which Wall Street Journal pundit
John Fund told the wife-beating story, even claiming his newspaper had copies of the nonexistent records.
Much to his credit, Democrat-Gazette Editorial page editor Paul Greenberg rebuked Fund, although he no
longer recalls the incident. Fund himself confirmed the episode, although he strenuously denies passing the
ugly gossip to Drudge.

    So who did? That turned into an expensive question. Indirectly funded from the deep pockets of Richard
Mellon Scaife, Drudge stonewalled, refusing to reveal his sources. There's no First Amendment right to libel
even a public figure. But the judge ruled that before he'd force Drudge to answer, Blumenthal must first exhaust
every possibility deposing a long list of witnesses, among them many conservative activists and pundits.

    Not only couldn't Blumenthal, a man of relatively modest means with a son in college, afford to do that,
but much of the Washington press establishment rose up in fury against him. Eventually, he had no choice
but to drop the case.

    "If even journalists can summon no outrage over what happened to the Blumenthals," Parloff writes,
"then the public's cynical mistrust of the media seems well-founded indeed."