As the MSM commentary of the Fox News/WH 'debate' continues to deaden the senses, with its now almost comical uniformity of how horribly wrong the administration is for fact-checking Fox News, the Los Angeles Times' Tim Rutten's belated, yet predictable, entry to the genre caught our attention if only for this passage:

Even though the White House is right on the merits when it describes Fox News as operating mainly as a surrogate for the Republican Party, making an issue of that fact is a tactical mistake.

Are you following? Rutten comes right out and concedes that the White House is right on the facts; that Fox News is not a legitimate source of journalism. In fact, according to the newspaper's columnist, Fox News consists of “long stretches of editorial comment, conservative and pro-Republican, interspersed with snippets of normative reporting.”

Wow. That's exactly the point the White House has been making. But Rutten isn't interested in holding the news media outlet accountable for his unprofessional brand of partisan reporting. Rutten, like virtually every pundits on the planet, is sure it's the White House that's out of line with its critique.

Incredibly, Rutten agrees with the critique. Rutten agrees that Fox News is essentially a propaganda outlet for the RNC. Rutten just doesn't think it made sense tactically for the White House to highlight that fact publicly.

UPDATED: Talk about ironic. At the bottom of his piece, Rutten sets aside a paragraph to say nice things about the recently deceased Jack Nelson, who served as the LA Times' Washington, D.C. bureau chief and, as Rutten properly points out, “was the paper's public face.” Rutten praised the esteemed Nelson as “one of the journalists who set the standards we all aspired to match.”

It's true. Nelson was an old school pro who scored scoops for the newspaper during Beltway journalism's glory days of the 1970's, and then helped steer the daily for decades after that. Rutten especially admired Nelson's “passion for truth and decency.”

Passion for truth and decency? This, of course, after Rutten finishes up a column in which he condemns the WH for highlighting Fox News' lack of truth and decency. I have no idea what Nelson thought of Fox News, and especially its unmanageably partisan incarnation of 2009. But the notion that legendary newsroom vets like Nelson would latch onto today's CW and needlessly cover for Murdoch's cable cabal seems unlikely to me.