Like other establishment media outlets, however, USA Today seems to have difficulty providing a level playing field to a candidate who consistently attacks corporate interests — otherwise known as the media’s owners and sponsors. An exercise in post-debate “fact-checking” by USA Today (12/14/07), for instance, took issue with this statement by Edwards: “One of the reasons that we’ve lost jobs, we’re having trouble creating jobs…is because corporate power and greed have literally taken over the government.”

The paper’s “reality,” as written by David Jackson and Fredreka Schouten, was this: “Edwards is wrong about job creation. There were 94,000 new jobs created in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since August 2003, 8.35 million jobs have been created.”

Actually, as FAIR points out, the widely repeated rule of thumb is that the economy must create about 150,000 jobs a month merely to keep up with population growth; 94,000 doesn’t even meet the basic minimum, let alone improve the situation. Are the reporters at USA Today prevented from doing basic research by an outdated computer system? Or are the facts that put things in perspective consistently elided from the final edited version, and therefore eventually just not worth including even if you know them?