Cue The Wrong Buzzer

This piece at Media Matters sums up more of my frustration over some liberal press-bashing.

I'm getting the feeling that if Tea Party conventioneers told the Times' Kate Zernike that the world was flat she'd run with it.

Uh, what was that?

As noted earlier, she referenced Tea Party organizers who claimed "millions" had marched at Tea Party protests within the last year; a figure that appers to be fabricated.

Now in a follow-up piece, Zernike writes

Susan and Gil Harper from Cushing, Me. — she a lawyer who telecommutes to New York, he a furniture maker — said they had limited their political involvement to voting. But Mr. Harper said the bank bailout outraged them, and pushed him to his first Tea Party rally.

By Christmas, he told his wife that what he wanted was a ticket to the Tea Party Convention. When she gave it to him, she said she would go along, but only incognito, wearing a hat and sunglasses.

“Because of Nancy Pelosi calling people who believe in the Tea Party movement Nazis,” she explained. “My grandfather’s family, as Polish Jews, escaped Nazism. To call us Nazis is an abomination.”

Fact: Nancy Pelosi never called Tea Party supporters "Nazis." Period. But the Times quotes a conservative making that slanderous claim. The Times treats the outlandish allegation as fact.

No. It treated that outlandish allegation as an attributed quote.

What, exactly, is wrong here? The doofus isn't the woman from the Times, who, after all, is only doing her job. It's pretty clear the doofus is this woman from Maine who believes that Nancy Pelosi has spies who are going to arrest all the Jewish Nazis at the Tea Party convention.

What else is this woman supposed to do? Attribute the quote by adding, "said the insane woman from Maine who apparently has no idea she has bought a bunch of bull"?

I'm honestly foozled here.