Last week, Newsbusters toasted ABC's World News Tonight for a report on the Ft. Hood handgun massacre; a report that was factually inaccurate. Now, in the wake of Dobbs' CNN departure, Newsbusters dips into the archives and tips its hat to Dobbs for doing such a great job covering the Wen Ho Lee espionage case back in 1999. Slight problem: Dobbs got the Lee story wrong.

Question: Aren't media critics supposed to chastise the press when they get it wrong, not congratulate it?

Basically, Newsbusters was thrilled because Dobbs, unlike the other news anchors at the time (at least that's the claim), jumped on the anti-Clinton story of the Wen Ho Lee spy case, and Dobbs wildly over-hyped it:

This is the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It is also ground zero in what is arguably the most alarming nuclear espionage scandal in nearly 50 years, certainly since the Rosenbergs. What has been stolen is a sophisticated miniaturized warhead technology.

Wrong and wrong, as it turned out. Although at the outset, that was certainly the talking points Republicans were pushing, so in that sense Dobbs got those correct.

But here's the best part: Newsbusters today doesn't bother to point out that the hype Dobbs initially pushed turned out to be bogus. Newsbusters pretends that the Wen Ho Lee story was a huge blockbuster that embarrassed the White House.

It wasn't. In fact, the case ended with a U.S. District Court judge apologizing to Lee in open court on behalf the government for the way prosecutors had “embarrassed our entire nation.”

Here's my favorite Newsbusters passage:

The press in 1999 also gave the la-la treatment to the possibility of any connection between the technology transfer and laundered political contributions that likely had Chinese origins.

The punch line? There was no connection. Period. Newsbusters is mad that the press, at least initially, didn't play up an angle that turned out to be false. Newsbusters wishes the press back in 1999 had hammered an anti-Clinton angle, even though it was bogus.

And yes, this week in honor of his CNN departure, Newsbusters congratulated Lou Dobbs for getting the Wen Ho Lee story wrong.