Who claims the media has thrown away all its credibility by fawning over Barack Obama.

The column, by a tech writer named Michael Malone, has been all the rage online for the last week, with practically every conservative writer with an Internet connection linking to the piece and hailing it as the unvarnished truth about the press and the campaign; about the media's “bewildering” “bias” as Malone calls it.

Now abcnews.com had decided to give Malone a truly national platform with a “Special to ABC News” column. And yes, we're still searching abcnews.com for a voice from the left sharply critiquing the media performance during the campaign season. We'll alert you as soon as we find it or when someone at ABC News sends us the link.

That being said, what's worth noting here is that Malone's now-viral column is pretty much loony.

After a long-winded preamble about his deep love for journalism and something about the war in Lebanon, and how, according to Malone, he was, “one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather” (oh good), he finally gets down to a specific example of how the press has thrown away all its credibility by going so easy on Obama.

And here it is: “Why..haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer?”

I kid you not. Malone thinks journalism is a joke because Obama's drug dealer from grad school hasn't been interviewed this campaign season.

He then goes on for many, many more paragraphs prescribing how to fix journalism, although Malone did a dreadfully bad job documenting what's wrong with it in the first place. Minus the missing drug dealer, that is.

Like I said, the effort is pretty loopy. But because right-wingers turned it into a blogosphere hit, ABC News thought it was a good idea to reproduce the column on the widely read abcnews.com site.

That's why it's called working the refs.