"Those liberals are calling us dumb!" seemed to be the feeling on the right--a strange reaction to a piece written by conservative Andrew Sullivan.

Newsweek is back on the case this week:

The response to conservative Sullivan comes from.... conservative writer David Frum. When will the liberal media give conservatives a fair shake, I ask you?

4. Get News from Al Jazeera

Don't shut yourself out from new ideas. A 2009 study found that viewers of Al Jazeera English were more open-minded than people who got their news from CNN International and BBC World.

That's a nice idea. Someone should tell my cable company, who make me pay way too much for the privilege of having Fox News Channel.

This week, though,  is another matter. John Solomon has a piece outlining the Strauss-Kahn defense, and he includes this:

Now sources familiar with Strauss-Kahn’s case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, say the defense could speculate that the encounter went bad when housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo discovered she would not receive any money after oral sex with the powerful Frenchman. Strauss-Kahn’s team may also try to portray Diallo, 32, as an “earner” who tried to pick up cash and gifts to supplement her $40,000 housekeeper’s salary, creating a financial motive to interpret some of the evidence in a new light.

So "sources familiar" with Strauss-Kahn's case-- anonymous, of course-- think that his lawyers "could speculate" that Diallo thought she was trading sex for money. Does Newsweek generally allow reporters to grant sources anonymity to float nasty rumors about things other people might say?

I was wondering if anything written about this case could be more offensive than Stuart Taylor's vile screed about the need to drop the charges against Strauss-Kahn because some rape cases have fallen apart ("Some seem to unlearn the lessons of such cases every time a poor (or not so poor) woman of color accuses a rich (or not so rich) white male of doing something horrible," he explained).

As we pointed out a few weeks ago, defense attorneys leaking information to discredit an accuser in a case like this is a fairly common practice. One would hope journalists would know better than to print them.

If someone wants to say this is an unflattering picture, fine.

But Bachmann's supporters are unlikely to find much in Lois Romano's article to complain about. On the campaign trail, Bachmann's "simple, black-and-white distillations of complex problems are cheered as refreshing and tough." A campaign speech is a "folksy assault on a bloated federal government."

Explaining Bachmann's apparent surge, Romano writes:

Just months ago, Bachmann was the butt of jokes on late-night TV for her flawed grasp of U.S. history. But all that changed one night this spring when she took the stage at the first major GOP presidential debate with the middle-aged, drab men running for the nomination, and set herself apart with poise and precision. When others meandered or waffled, she shot back with answers that reduced Washington's dysfunctional gridlock to understandable soundbites.

I'm not sure comedians have stopped writing jokes about her-- or that her "grasp" of U.S. history has changed much since the spring. So much of the corporate media's enthusiasm for Bachmann comes down to cheering her performance at that one debate. People who watched it, or read the transcript afterwards, might have a hard time reconciling the upbeat characterizations of Bachmann's performance with the actual words she spoke from the stage.

As we pointed out, her  answer on jobs, the biggest political question of the moment, was a call to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, which she said should be called  the "Job-Killing Organization of America." Was that "poise and precision?"

But it's not just Newsweek. In the Washington Post, former Bush adviser Nicolle Wallace wrote that at the debate, "Bachmann's answers were crisp, strategic and smoothly delivered."

The press have set the bar for Bachmann somewhere near the floor--which means she'll almost always be exceeding expectations. This is one of the defining features of the coverage of her presidential campaign.

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