Just, do yourself a favor…

Read this latest Media Matters weekly column by Jamison Foser, and re-read it once a month until November 2008.

And make sure everyone you know reads it too. So they can understand exactly how the “liberal” Washington Post and New York Times were, in many ways, central to the defeat of Al Gore.

And why confronting the brutal facts about our current national discourse is absolutely crucial.

Some people like to mock Bob Somerby for constantly harping on the treatment of Gore. But, that’s only because it is so easy to forget… Fading into the past, it seems harder and harder to believe.

Thankfully Foser provides excellent context for the recent misquoting of Hillary Clinton, and ties it into the important efforts of Bob Somerby.

He writes, in part…

So, in 2004, Ifill brought up Mary Cheney; Edwards responded by speaking very favorably of the Cheney family’s relationship and of the vice president’s comments about it. In 2006, Ifill misstated her own role in the exchange, falsely claiming that she hadn’t brought up the topic and that Edwards’s comments were “apropos of nothing.”

Once upon a time, Ifill obviously knew that wasn’t true. That’s how powerful these anti-Democrat, anti-progressive media narratives that have dominated public discourse for years are: Ifill told a tale that conformed to the storyline that Edwards and Sen. John Kerry somehow did something wrong in speaking of Mary Cheney — even though doing so required her to speak falsely about her own role in the matter!

When will it end? Alterman noted that the immediate online reaction to The New York Times‘ false Clinton story this week hastened a correction — a good sign, indeed.

But it’s worth remembering that when the Gore-Love Canal saga played out in 1999, there was contemporaneous online refutation of the bogus story. Throughout the mess, Somerby did the hard work, every day, of explaining in great detail and in real time how the media were getting it wrong — and yet the damage was done anyway.

Regular readers know where we’re going with this: It isn’t enough for Somerby and Alterman and Media Matters and Eschaton and Americablog and Daily Kos to keep a close eye on the media and insist that they get it right. Every progressive — every person who cares about the truth — has to do so.

Even though Clinton’s office asked for a correction the day the Kornblut story was published, even though bloggers posted the correct transcript the same day, and even though Media Matters posted the audio the next day — despite all that, The New York Times still took more than two days to correct the mistake.

With your help, the next time something like this happens — and it will, sooner rather than later — we can stop the false story more quickly. And speed is important: As the Love Canal incident reminds us, a mistake in The New York Times is one thing; a mistake in The New York Times that the rest of the media spends weeks repeating can change the course of history.