As is always the case, Jamison Foser does an absolutely fanstastic job of documenting the Freak Show week that was. His latest Media Matters column touches on the important high- and low-lights — from Bob Somerby’s scary epiphany that news coverage in the campaign of 2008 might be just as bad as 2000, to Atrios’ discussion of the origins of the Freak Show; from the lessons of the whole sordid Obama madrassa hoax to the latest inane comments from Chris Matthews.

And yes, as always, the post I wish I’d written (I swear that guy must be paid to do this) …

Somerby’s post caused us to think about how the media’s coverage during the 2000 presidential campaign of then-Vice President Al Gore’s childhood differs from the past week’s coverage of Sen. Barack Obama’s childhood education.

Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, news reports portrayed Al Gore as having grown up in a "vast" "penthouse suite" in the "elegant" and "swank" Fairfax Hotel, a "luxury Washington hotel." It wasn’t true, as we’ll see, but that didn’t get in the way of its ubiquity.

…

InsightMag.com’s Obama story was false, of course — but false stories there, under its previous incarnation as a print magazine called Insight on the News, have been credulously repeated by (theoretically) more responsible news organizations in the past. Among the various smears perpetuated against the Clintons in the 1990s by the media and their political opponents, it’s virtually impossible to identify one that was the most vicious and irresponsible. But Insight’s bogus (and quickly debunked) 1997 claim that Clinton auctioned off Arlington National Cemetery burial plots the highest bidder would have to make anyone’s short list.

Neither the sleaziness of Insight’s Arlington Cemetery report nor the report’s lack of named sources stopped other news organizations from running with it…

…

The media are still flooded with conservative misinformation every day. Indeed, while several news organizations have debunked the Obama-madrassa smear, few have debunked the Clinton-madrassa smear: the claim that Clinton’s campaign was behind the nonstory.

But recognition of the problem is growing — as is the ability of those who care to fight back.

And speaking of the Obama madrassa hoax story, Jonathan Alter offers a summary in "Behind the ‘Madrassa Hoax.’" Before I say anymore, though, I want to thank Alter for using the appropriate word "hoax" here. Most, including me, have been using "smear," but that’s not really accurate.

Alter joins Norm Ornstein and others in echoing Halperin and Harris’ "Freak Show" in describing the ways of new media information flow. How some fringe site starts a story, talk radio picks it up, then Fox News and then the rest of the media feels compelled to cover it. In some ways, despite the soft-focus on the fact that this is almost entirely a right-wing phenomena, it is somewhat remarkable to see these issues beginning to be discussed openly.

Within Alter’s piece, though, there’s one interesting quote from Clinton advisor Harold Ickes regarding the danger of the fast flow of information to a campaign’s oppostion research efforts. He says…

“If they [bloggers] can finger you trying to drop poison into the well, you’ll be hurt by it,” Ickes adds. “Stuff moves out so quickly that campaigns have to exercise much more control over their negative information apparatus.”

It’s certainly not an admission that Hillary Clinton’s "negative information appartus" was behind the madrassa hoax. But, it’s hard not to read that as an affirmation that "well, you know, maybe we throw around a lot of nasty ideas and if people got wind of some of them, it wouldn’t look so good for us."

Just saying. And as Alter says, "This could be good. When ‘oppo’ goes transparent, it might shrivel."

He’s also the first mainstream writer from what I can tell who’s mentioned ObamaTruth.org, the Michelle Obama smear site run by Joe Novak. Alter adds a bit more to this story by describing Novak as "a Chicago media consultant with a longtime rivalry with David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign chief."

Hmm…

One amusing note about this article that discusses the flow of misinformation about Obama’s childhood: Alter writes about "his atheist father, a Kenyan academic whom Obama met only once in his life." But, of course, Barack Obama lived with his father until he was two.

Just saying.