I was reading the paper's wire service report on Tommy Thompson dropping out of the presidential race when I noticed the "Related Searches" sidebar:

Note item #4. That's wingnut welfare propaganda from "Newsbusters," the "all media that doesn't bow to conservative causes is liberal and biased" spew run by Brent Bozell and founded by the Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock, Carthage, and JM foundations, etc. It's trying to pretend that it's "news" somehow that Markos is a Democrat, even when Kos has made clear since about, oh, day one that his major objective is to elect Democrats. The piece comes ready-made from the wingnut version of "current events Eliza," complete with references to the "Democrat Party," dishonesty about the effects of tax cuts, and flat-out lies that there "must" be money available for infrastructure because "Congress will spend almost $1 trillion more this year than in fiscal 2000," an observation more commonly and briefly spelled I-R-A-Q.

Why did this come up? Probably because the articles, collected by Inform.com, are selected using "relationship algorithsm and natural language processing" to find "relevant, interrelated content from the publisher's data repositories and other sources." In other words, the Oklahoman is full of dishonest conservative spin, so Inform.com selects the same thing for its pages. Item #3 is also a right-wing blogger.

(And in case your conservative friends go apopletic and point to "NPR! NPR! Sputter! Rage!" in the list, the two NPR links are either to straight news stories or to a five-minute, 27-second piece in which New Hampshire Public Radio interviews New Hampshire Republicans on George W. Bush and the GOP presidential candidates. I shouldn't even have to point this out, since it's such a straw argument, but I don't want to have to do it later just in case someone sputters that the presence of NPR as straight news mixed with two right-wing blogs and zero progressive sources somehow means "fair and balanced.")

If you'd like to read what really happened on Meet the Press, try here, complete with video links so you can watch it if you like. As long as you're there, don't miss this article about how Rudy Guliani closed a state-run psychiatric clinic and evicted all the patients, along with a senior citizens center and non-profit children's center, so he could repossess the building and put a homeless shelter in it as political payback to one of his opponents. You probably won't be reading that in the Oklahoman either.

"Here’s a guy who would go to that length, because I beat him on passing a law that requires smaller-bed shelters. Because we would not blink, he would throw kids, seniors, and the mentally ill out into the street. I mean, could I have written a better script to expose the fact of what he was?"