Leave it to CNN to spin this one in favor of John Kerry. The Bush campaign puts together an ad complaining about the fact that George Bush has been compared to Hitler by several leading Democrats and Democratic organizations. In this ad, they show the "Bush is Hitler" images from moveon.org interspersed with some of the more hysterical recent democratic campaign speeches. What's the headline? "Hitler Image Used in Bush Campaign Web Ad." True, this is not technically a lie, but the intellectual dishonesty is painfully obvious. The rest of the article is worded in such a way as to make it seem like the Bush campaign simply interspersed some Hitler footage in with footage of leading Democrats, rather than making it clear that the Hitler images are from the moveon.org ad.

I realize that it's easy to sound like a paranoid partisan when you complain of media bias, but anyone who can't see the spin here is either an idiot or is simply choosing to ignore fact. The Bush ad is pretty weak and could have made its point much more effectively, to be sure. But are we supposed to believe that the Bush campaign has somehow done something more inappropriate than the people who made the moveon.org ad or who gave those speeches? I guess the use of Hitler is now kind of like the "N" word; Democrats can use it freely but if Republicans use it, even when paraphrasing Democrats, they have crossed the line.

We've touched on the whole "real news vs. editorials" thing a few times on this site. Here's the only difference: Editorials are honest about the fact that they are giving an opinion about the news.