It's been said before, and it needs to be said again...

Most in the major broadcast media (with the exception of Keith Olbermann and David Schuster on MSNBC) have been pretty lazy about the nature of Bush's leak approval. They are simply reporting Bush's claim that he declassified because "he wanted the 'TRUTH' to be out there".

By now, of course, most of the country (with the exception of the well-healed of the beltway) know that whenever Bush mentions the "truth" he might as well start blinking furiously and play with ballbearings. But straight from AmericaBlog comes this reminder:

Okay, and do you think it might be relevant to include in the AP story the fact that the information that Bush leaked in order to supposedly "spread the truth" was in fact information that had already been proven wrong months BEFORE Bush authorized it to be leaked?

In other words, Bush wasn't spreading the truth, he was intentionally spreading lies. Do you think you'd find that relevant?

From this weekend's Washington Post:

But according to Libby's grand jury testimony, described for the first time in legal papers filed this week, Cheney "specifically directed" Libby in late June or early July 2003 to pass information to reporters from two classified CIA documents: an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and a March 2002 summary of Wilson's visit to Niger.

One striking feature of that decision -- unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it -- is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

In other words, Bush didn't want people to see the truth, in fact he intentionally leaked false information, information he knew had been disproven months before, in order to trick the American people into supporting the war in Iraq under false circumstances.

If you were a normal human being, and you had a story in front of you about how the president is now claiming he was trying to spread the truth when in fact it's known that the president was knowingly spreading lies, you'd find that last little fact kind of relevant to your story. In fact, you'd find the fact that the president outright lied today a rather BIG story.

But if you're the Associated Press, well, it would seem that you, like Fred Hiatt, can't be bothered to actually follow the news you're writing about. I mean, what's accuracy when you can settle for truthiness.