Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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The guys at LGF noticed:

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales can’t possibly believe the fraudulent CBS memos might be genuine, can he?

Tireless press critics during war or peacetime, the conservatives were handed a valuable new weapon when CBS News fumbled a report detailing the president’s shoddy record as a member of the National Guard back in Texas. The report was attacked virtually the moment it aired on “60 Minutes”; documents used to bolster the allegations were condemned by conservative critics as phony and forged, though no forging has yet been proved.

CBS News announced formation of an independent panel to produce a report on the report (when it’s unveiled, conservatives are sure to circulate their own report on the report on the report) and, sadly, “CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather moved up the planned date of his retirement from the anchor chair. “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw’s departure occurred a short time later — with barely a peep of controversy.

When you're a television critic... do you just get to ignore inconvenient facts? Did that little comment just slide right past all the Post editors? I mean, dozens of bloggers - and Shales' co-worker Howard Kurtz, among other mainstream media reporters - put considerable time and effort into proving that the memos were fake. The case was comprehensive, detailed, and exhaustive. There is no way to make a document that looks like it was spat out of Microsoft Word yesterday using 1972 technology.

And yet Shales gets to just blurt out that the facts are otherwise... well, just because he wants to, because he's the high and mighty Powerful Newspaper Television Critic. And absolutely nobody in the Washington Post editorial chain of command calls him on it.

Shales is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

UPDATE: I'm slacking. Scylla & Charybdis finds 10 errors in one paragraph.

[Posted 12/28 02:36 PM]