I tuned into C-SPAN on Friday night and caught part of a panel discussion hosted by Arianna Huffington. One of the panelists was Weekly Standard reporter Stephen Hayes, who is perhaps best known for advancing the bogus theory that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were in cahoots.

And oddly enough, the discussion turned to misleading political advertising, and the efforts to factcheck such political lying--an effort that Hayes cheered:

HUFFINGTON: What else can the media do, Steve?

HAYES: I think one of the upsides to the proliferation of information sources is that you can go to places and find out whether an ad is truthful or not. I mean, you certainly--whether it's Politifact or whether it's local reporters who have teamed up with national media outlets that are fact checking these things almost on a real-time basis.

Ultimately as a believer in free markets, I think if you put out good information that follows bad, if you can identify blatantly misleading political ads, and call them on it, I think that  people will learn that it doesn't pay to run those kinds of ads.

Hayes went on to say:

But I do believe that if you provide people with good information, provide them with places to get that good information, they will ultimately use it.

I guess Hayes thinks some people should be factchecked.

Addressing Bush-era Department of Justice investigations, David Swanson (6/26/09) is asking OpEd News readers the provocative question, "Did you know the United States has in recent years prosecuted hundreds of people for political reasons?"

This is a crime, or rather a crime wave, that has thus far been addressed primarily by ignoring it. You can read a lot about it from bloggers like Larisa Alexandrovna or Scott Horton. But you won't hear the president mention it on TV.

In an attempt to convince the corporate media that this issue ranked right up there with governors' sex lives and celebrities' deaths, a group of notable speakers, judges, attorneys, victims and witnesses gathered and spoke on Friday morning at the National Press Club.

Swanson's piece includes the text from "what I blogged from the event" and tells us that "you can watch the whole forum on C-SPAN. You won't find it anywhere else."