KURTZ: What do people think, Gloria Borger, when they hear this kind of arcane debate? What do they think about the media?

I think the question is, was George W. Bush another rich or privileged or well-connected kid who got out of going to Vietnam and going into the National Guard at that time because of his family connections? By the way, there's nothing wrong with that if he did. Lots of people -- lots of people did it at the time. Colin Powell wrote in his book that he didn't like that kind of behavior, but that did go on at the time, and Bush says he had no connections. So that's a legitimate question.

(Emphasis mine)

Or how about when they get mired down in an argument about how everyone is sick of Vietnam?

BORGER: Can I just say, this is why people hate politics. This is why people hate journalists and the way we cover campaigns. Because...

You don't keep your eye on the ball?

KURTZ: It's all gotcha?

BORGER: We live at the bottom of the food chain. I always say this, and if there's a good fight going on, we're going to cover it. But...

Of course everyone is sick of Vietnam. And yes, we bloggers exhaustively analyzed the and drove the SwiftVets story the way we exhaustively analyze everything, and we certainly would have exhaustively analyzed Bush's Vietnam-era record as these new allegations were raised (and probably still will - yawn) ... but the forgeries changed the narrative.

Because beyond being sick of Vietnam, what we are even more sick about is the idea that one of the traditional pinnacles of journalistic integrity rushed a story with a fake document, the fact that almost every single human source in the story has said that they were ignored or misrepresented, and that CBS is stonewalling instead of opening the books and practicing responsible and transparent journalism. This isn't just bad for CBS, or bad for the mainstream media; it's bad for everyone. It's bad for society. Bloggers like to get smug and trumpet some sort of natural superiority over BIG Media, but the reality is that we need BIG Media. Our system of government and society as a whole need the mainstream media to act as a reasonably honest broker in the basic function of our civilization. And if these forgeries and irresponsible practices are true, easy, relatively common and can be committed without any consequence, I honestly fear that our society is in trouble.

Do sources burn you? Yes. Can forgeries get passed off on honest journalists? Sure. Do journalists make mistakes? Definitely. But when I was a journalism student at a pretty good J school, I learned that there's a standard, appropriate method for dealing with the ominpresent possibility that your source turns on you or hands you false information:

Openness and a willingness to look into the matter and report the results.

So why isn't Howard Kurtz (one of my favorite columnists on the media) beating down the door on this angle of the story?

Why are the panelists on a show called "Reliable Sources" getting bogged down in the debate over the public perception over the political attack angle instead of discussing CBS's failure to embrace accountability? Where is the outrage? Let's review their mission statement:

ABOUT THE SHOW
CNN's "Reliable Sources" continues its successful run as one of television's few weekly programs to examine the performance of the media.

Like I told you, depressing.

UPDATE: Largely unrelated, but I think that most of this is a fantastically true statement:

We bloggers tend to think on "internet time," which is psychotically accelerated. This story, the forgery story, only started on Thursday. Four days! What if it takes another four days to get resolved? For one thing, many of us will have strokes and be unemployed. But very shortly, it will all shake out.

It's the part about "it will all shake out" that I'm unsure of. Resolution now!