I'm still on vacation, but I cannot escape The New York Times. Thus....

One perpetual problem of the MSM was illustrated by The New York Times on Wednesday: the inability to call plainly a lie a lie. Or a liar a liar.

In an front-page article on this year's Swift Boat attack--a best-selling anti-Obama book written by Jerome Corsi--the Times defined the story as Corsi's attempt to do to Barack Obama what he did to John Kerry (with his 2004 book challenging Kerry's Vietnam War record). It did not make Corsi's demonstrably false charges the main focus of the piece. To be sure, the article did include examples of Corsi's misleading and untrue allegations. But his (presumably) purposeful mangling of the facts was not in the lead:

In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the bestseller lists as co-author of "Unfit for Command," the book attacking Senator John Kerry's record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry's war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam" - Mr. Obama is Christian - and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

The next paragraph noted that "significant parts" of the book have been "challenged." And the piece said, "Fact-checking [a book like this one] can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber."

Wait a minute--isn't the Times able to do such a fact-checking job? After all in 2004, the Times did publish a front-page article that thoroughly debunked the case of the anti-Kerry Swift Boaters. This piece, though, noted that Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog, has done the most aggressive fact-checking of Corsi's latest hit job. And then the Times, repeating some of Media Matters work, did report that "several of the book's accusations, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate." But it gave only two examples. (For instance, Corsi claims Obama has "yet to answer" whether he used marijuana and cocaine after college. Obama has indeed said he has not used any drugs since he was 20 years old.)

The thrust of the Times piece was the controversy over the book: Corsi makes charges about Obama; others cry foul. And calling Corsi a "gadfly" hardly captured the man who has decried Islam as a "dangerous Satanic religion," has accused John Kerry of being secretly a Jew, and who has implied that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. (None of Corsi's more coarse observations were mentioned in the Times article. See here for more.)

The Times could have covered this story in a different fashion. Consider this alternative lead:

A new best-selling book by the co-author of the 2004 book that falsely accused John Kerry of exaggerating his Vietnam War record contains significant allegations about Barack Obama that are false, according to an extensive Times review of the charges.

The Times took the easy path. It zeroed in on the fuss over the book--and in typical he said/she said fashion allowed Corsi and Media Matters to each accuse the other of mugging the truth to serve a political agenda. But the evidence is clear: Corsi is the offender here. Certainly, the article led reasonable readers to that conclusion. But this was an instance when the newspaper of record could have served the truth more by fully concentrating on Corsi's false charges. Within this bastion of the so-called liberal media, Corsi got off easy.