Here's how Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz describes one of Newsweek's potential buyers:

One is Newsmax, a conservative Web site and monthly favored by Sarah Palin and founded by Christopher Ruddy, who once investigated conspiracy theories that Clinton administration officials Vince Foster and Ron Brown were murdered.

That's quite an antiseptic description of Ruddy, who didn't investigate conspiracy theories so much as he created and promoted them. Kurtz's phrasing -- that Ruddy “once investigated conspiracy theories” suggests that Ruddy at one time looked into them, perhaps for the purpose of debunking them. In fact, he obsessively promoted the looney conspiracy theories for years -- so obsessively, in fact, that even Rupert Murdoch's New York Post tired of his crackpot ways and got rid of him. After that, he slung his mud on Richard Mellon Scaife's dime at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Kurtz's decision to gloss over Ruddy's past is not an inconsequential one; if Ruddy is successful in taking over Newsweek, its readers deserve to know his disgraceful background.