Every month the media runs another poll and harps on how far President Bush's approval ratings have dropped. At 50%, Bush's approval rating is the lowest it has ever been, they say. As Rich Tucker points out, perhaps these people shouldn't be throwing so many stones.

There's panic at TV networks across the country. Or at least, there should be.

An annual Gallup poll shows that only 30 percent of Americans have confidence in television news. The same 30 percent express confidence in newspapers. That puts these journalistic institutions near the bottom of the survey, behind the military (75 percent confidence), organized religion (53 percent) and even the criminal-justice system (34 percent).

I wonder why this poll isn't getting too much exposure? Tucker goes on to examine a Washington Post Bush hit-piece that I covered here last week.

Staff writers Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei hammered out some 2,000 words accusing the administration of, basically, practicing politics. That is, running negative campaign ads. [...]

The May 31 story goes on to accuse Vice President Cheney of "stretching the truth." Cheney had said that in Kerry's view, "opposing terrorism is far less of a military operation and more of a law enforcement operation." But "Kerry did not say what Cheney attributes to him," Milbank and VandeHei claim.

Oh? Again, they need to read their own paper. "I will use our military when necessary, but [the war on terrorism] is not primarily a military operation," the Post quoted Kerry as saying on April 19, after the senator appeared on "Meet The Press." "It's an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort." It's not Cheney who's stretching the truth here.

It's a typical playbook. Tell the lies you want to be heard on page 1-A, then run the corrections on page 16-F.