David Carr has a great piece today looking at the way the media can jump onto a non-story such as the bogus claims of Shirley Sherrod being a racist, which were unfounded and corrected, and in the process ignore an important story such as The Washington Post's three-day series on intelligence community mismanagement and spending.

" ... that story was all but drowned out by sexier, less momentous news, driven by an increasingly common activist-journalist hybrid on the Web," Carr said about the Post series, later adding, “Where once there was a pretty bright line between journalist and political operative, there is now a kind of a continuum, with politicians becoming media providers in their own right, and pundits, entertainers and journalists often driving political discussions.”

Carr also stated: “Even the most tradition-bound journalists would concede that while watching the world spin, they like to nudge it every once in a while. Why, after all, would someone spend their professional life enmeshed in the civic conversation unless they had a stake in it somewhere? But what is emerging is more of a permanent crusade, where information is not only power, but a means to a specific end.”