Good coverage of bad journalism

The media has been jumping all over progressive blogs lately with the ol' angry extremist routine. This has ticked off plenty of bloggers, who've recently noted a wave of right-wing blog posts calling for the assassination of reporters, judges, and other boogeymen that are being totally ignored by the press.

But there's at least one thing that the blogs do really well-- unmask shoddy, misleading journalism as soon as it appears and setting the record straight. This is an excellent example:

Writing for the New York Times, Ann Kornblutt misconstrues something Hillary Clinton says and uses it to launch some attacks on Democrats.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, returning to her red-state ties, chastised Democrats Saturday for taking on issues that arouse conservatives and turn out Republican voters rather than finding consensus on mainstream subjects.

Without mentioning specific subjects like gay marriage, Mrs. Clinton said: "We do things that are controversial. We do things that try to inflame their base."

"We are wasting time," the senator told a group of Democratic women here, on part of a two-day swing through a state that could provide an alternate hub to New York if she starts a national political campaign.

The problem is that Clinton wasn't using "we" to describe Democrats, she was using it to describe the GOP-controlled Senate. And the gratuitous mention of gay marriage is doubly shameful, because it's painfully obvious to anyone who's read a newspaper in the last six years that gay marriage is a Republican issue, dragged out in every election year to win votes from their angry and/or fundamentalist base.