Question: How can you tell when a journalist is lying?
Answer: Check to see if they are communicating with the public.

Good heavens, it's been a great time recently for exposing media bias and incompetance. Of course, the bias was there before, and obviously, what we're seeing is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, but it's good some of it is being brought into the open. In no particular order...

1. The L.A. Times Gets a Clue

Deb posts an in internal L.A. Times memo (via O'Reilley, apparently) in which the Times actually admits bias and excoriates it's section heads for it. Perhaps there's hope yet...

2. Maureen Dowd Deliberately Misquotes Bush?

Vinny points to a NewMax article discussing how Maureen Dowd recently (apparenly deliberately) edited a Bush quote to alter its meaning, making the President seem to say Al-Qaeda was not a problem anymore -- which she then used to criticize him.

Maureen Dowd biased and less than honest? Who could have imagined such a thing. Speaking of imponderables...

3. Al-Jazira Profits from Suffering of Iraqi Children

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard discusses relevations that Al-Jazira was on the take from the Iraqi Ba'ath party, as were, apparently, many other news organizations in the mideast.

Of course, the real suprise is that we ever found out for sure. But that's one advantage of gaining access to your former enemy's intelligence files.

4. AIM on Scott Ritter

I found this summary of Scott Ritter's possible motives for bias buried in AIM's coverage of the NY Times scandal:

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Ritter may have been manipulated by Iraqi and other intelligence agencies. We know about his arrest for soliciting sex with an under-age minor. Ritter insists the case was dismissed, and the records were sealed. He reportedly underwent sex offender counseling but doesn't want to talk about it. Before that, he worked in the old Soviet Union as a "disarmament specialist," where he met Marina Khatiashvili, a young woman from Soviet Georgia who would later become his second wife. She served as a Russian-supplied "escort" and translator, and reported to the KGB. In another controversy, Ritter accepted $400,000 from an Iraqi-born American businessman, Shakir Alkafajii, to fund his half-hour documentary, "In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq." The film was screened at the U.N. and was supposed to air on Al-Jazeera, the Arab television network. Ritter has strongly denied being an Iraqi agent.

Also, below it they mention Notra Trulock's revelations that:

[T]wo former senior FBI agents who were supposed to be investigating Chinese espionage were having sex with Katrina M. Leung, a Chinese-American woman who raised money for the Republican Party and is said to be a spy for Beijing.

5. AIM on French Media Hallucinations

More recently, AIM turns their attention to the French media, and documents some whoppers that were sold to the French people. Select winners include:

• When an April 8 explosion at Baghdad?s Palestine Hotel killed two journalists and injured several others, the French media immediately piled on to blame American troops... An Iraqi missile strike (rather than a US tank) is now considered the more likely culprit. The French public has largely been spared this new information.
• [In] "Les Guignols" [The Puppets] ... US soldiers are shown "playing with the decapitated heads of tortured Guantanamo prisoners." In a later scene, an American serviceman strangles his own mother while suffering a combat 'flashback' precipitated by the sight of her gas-guzzling SUV.
• During the war, France 2 news repeatedly reported that Coalition bombs were ?destroying the country? and implied that civilians were being deliberately targeted. When these reports turned out to be false, there was no attempt to disabuse their audience of the previous distortions.