The Right's Hatefest Toward Journalists

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters dissects the right-wing madness over one AP stringer:

Warbloggers endured a bleak November, watching their political heroes suffer the loss of both houses of Congress, while President Bush's approval ratings fell toward Nixonian levels, the mainstream media finally conceded the battle for Iraq had broken down into a civil war, and even war architect Donald Rumsfeld was tossed overboard. Everything warbloggers had championed over the past five years -- waging war with Islamists and creating a permanent Republican majority inside the Beltway -- came undone, and the chronically incorrect warbloggers, angry ideologues who make Sean Hannity look like a man of reason, slipped into the realm of the laughingstock.

But then on November 24, a ray of hope appeared, a much-needed spark that self-anointed war scribes rallied around to lift their spirits. Amidst the carnage inside Iraq and the political collapse at home, warbloggers identified America's most treacherous enemy -- a stringer for the Associated Press.

I highly recommend that you read the entire piece. It's very detailed, and link-rich, and meticulously documents how the right obsessed (and obssesses, still) about the accuracy of one news report in an attempt to create a larger narrative of a U.S. media with, as Michelle Malkin put it, "a vested interest in exaggerating the violence [in Iraq] as much as possible."