Marc Ambinder on McCain's new ad:

BTW: the ad claims that Palin “stopped the Bridge to Nowhere,” which is technically true but functionally false. No blowback, though: the electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record of their candidate and their opponent. It's probably an artifact of twenty years' worth of campaign advertisements and has something to do with the way consumers process news.

Matthew Yglesias explains what's wrong with this:

[C]ouldn't it have something to do with the way the campaign press reports news? Back in 2000, the exit polls showed that among the 24 percent of the electorate who said it was very important to them to select an “honest and trustworthy” president, 80 percent voted for George W Bush. This, I assume, had something to do with the fact that the press repeatedly weaved through its coverage of Gore a narrative about Gore's alleged difficulty telling the truth, even though most of the data points where Gore lied or “exaggerated” were actually made up by the press. McCain, by contrast, has not only been caught in several bald-faced lies, but in a few instances - this business with Palin and the bridge most notably - keeps on doing it in very high-profile contexts even though they've gotten called on it repeatedly. So where's the narrative about how McCain's key strategy introducing Sarah Palin to the public and turning his campaign around is based on putting lies at the heart of the presentation? There are a few dozen people, of whom Marc is one, in a position to create this narrative. They've chosen not to do so, but that's a decision they've made not a fact about “the way consumers process news.”

Quite right.

Four days ago -- the morning after Sarah Palin's convention speech -- Ambinder wrote: “The press and the larger media will obsess over her and her family and her life. Every word she says will be subject to parsing and semiotic analysis.”

Even as Ambinder wrote those words, the media was ignoring the fact that the night before, Palin had once again lied about telling Congress Alaska didn't want the bridge to nowhere. Palin's words weren't “parsed” - the media ignored her false claims, or repeated them as though they were true.

And now Ambinder pretends the lack of “blowback” over Palin's false claims is a result of “the way consumers process news.”

Nonsense. It's quite obviously a result of the fact that the media isn't telling people about those false claims. Instead, they're just asserting that Palin is effective and “authentic.”