I’d like to hear from anyone as to how reporters can ignore a subject’s request to be “off the record.” If that’s the stipulation to attend a briefing, how do they get away with ignoring it?

We’re liars, all. We may call it a white lie or one told to spare someone’s feelings, but we all lie. I’ve lied many time about small things – and some big ones. Sometimes, I’ll embellish a harmless story for comedic effect. But I usually feel so guilty about it, I’ll mention my exaggeration once I’ve gotten the laugh, just to keep the record straight.

But George Bush lies differently. He lies needlessly. When someone lies so thoughtlessly and so regularly and in print, you’ve got to wonder when he ever tells the truth.

When Mr. Bush pumped up the intelligence on Iraqi W.M.D., his exaggerations reflected the overriding truth as he saw it – that Saddam Hussein was a menace. I think Mr. Bush considered himself truthful, even when he wasn’t factual.

If Mr. Bush were a private citizen, I would admire his tenacity, just as I respect Barry Goldwater, Red Sox fans and Flat-Earthers. But for a president, I wish we had a clear-eyed thinker who understood the difference between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein

Much is written about the lack of substantive coverage during election campaigns. I’ve certainly done so before.

Now the Village Voice has a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates with the headline “Lazy Bums.”

Aly Colón, leader of an ethics group at the Poynter Institute, says he’d like to see stories that balance coverage of the competition with some analysis of what the campaigns represent. “Both approaches can be done, even if it seems that the horse-race approach is the norm,” says Colón. “It doesn’t mean that a story couldn’t provide more coverage, in addition to that horse-racing aspect, to create a fuller picture of how the candidate might act in office.”

Of course this would require more work, more research, and more sourcing. “We’re lazy,” says [William Saletan, chief political correspondent for Slate]. “We’re really, really lazy. First of all, we’re cowards because we are afraid of being not objective. We’re also just lazy. There may be two reporters in the country who understand tax policy. The rest of us are talking to our friends and reading each other in the paper.”

Well said.

A few weeks back, George Mason University in Fairfax withdrew an invitation to Michael Moore to speak on campus. Now Christopher Newport University in Newport News [not Norfolk, as I incorrectly first posted] Va., is trying to thwart the showing of Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9-11.”

A student bought the film on DVD and planned to show it free to others. But CNU President Paul Trible, a former GOP senator, has demanded the students pay a $500 licensing fee to show the film, according to an email Commonwealth Commonsense received from the CNU Young Democrats today.

CNU has a reputation for being very conservative. Some of those conservatives may also be intolerant.

Kerry/Edwards buttons ripped off bookbags, torn from windows and vandalized, protests during a voter-registration drive, curses from fellow students.

These are few of the things the Young Democrats at Christopher Newport University say have happened to their members since the start of the school year.

At least 10 of the 30 active group members have experienced some form of harassment, said Young Democrats President Erin Spicer, who noted that she has not been harassed.

“We expected it to be a close election, but we didn’t expect hostility,” she said.

Hilliary Turner, secretary for the Young Democrats, said she dealt with about four students who used profanity in referring to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry while in class. They demanded to know why she was voting for him, Turner said.

“I said, ‘I don’t have to answer your question when you’re calling John Kerry those names, and it’s none of your business,’ ” she said. Along with critical e-mail sent to the organization, “we’ve had people interrupt our officer meetings to complain about John Kerry,” Turner said.

You can donate to the CNU’s Young Dems to help them raise the funds. Click through here.

… to perform at Kerry rallies.

Another $70 billion for Iraq.

The best source for this story is Josh Marshall. He’s been all over it.

U.S. forces are claiming they’ve killed an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but provide no evidence.

“Recent strikes and raids targeting the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi network have severely degraded its ability to conduct attacks,” the U.S. statement said. It did not identify the slain al-Zarqawi aide.

So we don’t even know who it is. Meanwhile, the interim government is blaming last week’s mass executions on U.S. “negligence.”

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi blamed U.S.-led coalition forces for “negligence” in their handling of security during the ambush.

“It was a heinous crime where a group of National Guards were targeted,” Allawi said. “There was great negligence on the part of some coalition forces

And how many of the Iraqi trainees can we trust?

Last week, a U.S. defense official in Washington described Iraq’s security forces as “heavily infiltrated” by insurgents, saying some Iraqi soldiers and police have developed sympathies and contacts with the guerrillas. In other instances, infiltrators were sent to join the security services, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Wonderful!

Sorry about the lack of postings. Been traveling and otherwise occupied. But I should be back in the saddle this week.

In a shameless bit of self-promotion (though I’m sure I was not alone) and a more altruistic call to others to write to The Washington Post’s Ombudsman Michael Getler, compare what I wrote about balanced journalism in a post Oct. 7, a copy of which I sent to Getler, and what he wrote in his Oct. 17 column.

I wrote:

Today’s article about the charges John Edwards made in the debate against Dick Cheney is headlined “Halliburton Charges Jumbled by Edwards And Denied by Cheney.” The lede and second graph:

In the debate with Vice President Cheney on Tuesday, Sen. John Edwards referred to allegations of wrongdoing by Halliburton Corp. several times and raised questions about the Bush administration’s handling of government contracting in Iraq.

But in doing so, Edwards occasionally jumbled or oversimplified the complex details of the company’s role as a contractor and of its ties to Cheney, who served as Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

But then the 559-word article charges only that

…the Democrat conflated two contracts, the second of which is a troop support arrangement awarded to Halliburton before the war, after a competition. That contract helped make Halliburton the top government contractor in Iraq. The Pentagon has considered — but has not acted on — several suggestions from auditors to withhold 15 percent of future payments because of questions about the company’s billing.

The rest of the article essentially confirms Edwards’ charges are accurate.

Getler wrote:

The Post, on Oct. 6, produced a solid “For the Record” fact-checking story that was headlined “Misleading Assertions Cover Iraq War and Voting Records.” Yet you could argue fairly, as I thought some did, that the largest and most important part of this story was the job it did challenging Cheney’s statement before a huge television audience that “I have not suggested there’s a connection between Iraq and 9/11.” But the headline and first paragraph gave no powerful clue about that, or about the fact that when you read through the piece most of it is spent challenging statements by Cheney.

The next day, a fact-checking story carried the headline “Halliburton Charges Jumbled by Edwards and Denied by Cheney.” This was also solid reporting, but the thrust of the article essentially backed up and explained most of Edwards’s charges. Yet the one instance of a “jumbled” reference by Edwards to two contracts got the second paragraph of the story and the headline.

Polishing my nails aside, the encouraging thing for all of us is that Getler listens. The question is do the Post writers and editors? Take a look at this morning’s Howard Kurtz’s piece (one of three with his byline this morning; does this guy sleep?). Having largely ignored the imbalance between Bush’s lies and Kerry’s positive ads until late in the campaign, Kurtz now decides it’s time to sort this out. Of course, only because Kerry has decided to respond in kind.

From March through August, Bush tried to bury Kerry under a blizzard of attack ads, some of them based on misleading charges, while the Massachusetts senator aired mainly positive ads. Even after turning negative in September, Kerry has pushed the factual envelope less often than the president — until recently.

Even the lede on this story first twice cites a Kerry misrepresentation before citing a Bush one.

As the presidential campaign careens toward the finish line, John F. Kerry is denouncing deep Social Security cutbacks that President Bush has not proposed. And Bush is slamming “government-run” health care that Kerry has refused to embrace.

Kerry says the president could bring back a military draft, despite Bush’s vociferous denials. Bush suggests Kerry regards terrorism as a “nuisance” when the senator merely said his goal is to reduce it to that level.

Still, fact checking, thanks in large part to the blogoshere and the candidates pushing the boundaries, might be here to stay. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find some true balance and objectivity in reporting, with the help of ombudsmen such as Getler.