"Liberal" Media Questions

Last week when I attended a breakfast at G-town's Mad Platter the morning of the Belmont debate to hear Politico.com writers Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith give their impressions of the campaign and to field some questions, I didn't pursue the question preying foremost on my mind at the time, "What's up with the vain and self-referential cartoon portraits you guys have up on your columns? How come they look nothing like you?"

If the breakfast would have been this week, I would have most definitely had some different questions: "Hey, Martin, how come you have to run with a story inventing a McCain proposal for tax cuts that was never in the works and continue to leave it up on line? Is it because he let you light his grill at last spring's McCain media cook-out? And, Smith, why draw a false equivalence between some crude Palin t-shirts and blood curdling McCain supporters yelling "Obama is a terrorist" who should be killed? Is irritating soccer-mom manners the true moral equivalent of rationalized assassination?


UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald wrote some revealing comments over the weekend about Jonathan Martin's associations:

Spending your nights socializing with the most vicious GOP operatives or your weekends cooking with John McCain and giving flowers to his wife won’t have any impact at all on your ability to cover what they’re doing or investigating and skeptically scrutinizing their claims.