Toronto Star media columnist Antonia Zerbisias looks at the year in North American media and rates it better than 2003. Among the victims she IDs: Kitty Kelley (?!?!).

Here's an exerpt:

... when Kitty Kelley's 733-page The Family: The Real Story Of The Bush Dynasty was published, it was quickly discounted because the media focus was on a few pages relating how George W. had snorted coke at Camp David during his father's presidency. That despite how Bush has never denied using drugs. As a result, the rest of this meticulously researched book was ignored, including its damning sections on dubious Bush family connections, shady business deals and a long history of racism.

But then, the media are notorious for their selectivity.

I'm astonished she could write that without having mentioned a word (ever, I should note) about Gary Webb, who had his grave pissed on by the MSM as well as his work. Selective rebuttal and deliberate missing of the forest for trees was the hallmark of the MSM in that case too.

Zerbisias also wrote this (which actually preceded the Kelly stuff in the column):

Meanwhile, no other major news outlet took on the fact that there were great big gaping holes in Bush's service flight logs — which have yet to be made public. Oh, but the media did go to town on Democratic contender John Kerry's combat record. It seemed that the entire month of August there was nothing else worth probing other than whether the decorated veteran bled red-white-and-blue enough in Vietnam.

Not quite true.

U.S. News and World Report did some solid reporting on this which backed up some of what CBS did.

Zerbisias's column also shows a thorny problem: The natural contraction of history.

CBS's Dan Rather capped a mostly distinguished career by using questionable documents to question Bush's questionable National Guard service during Vietnam. That resulted in the network shelving another investigation of far more troublesome documents, the forged Niger papers that the White House used to make its "case" for disarming Saddam Hussein.

Yeah, CBS did use questionable documents. No doubt they made a bad judgment call by not listening to the division amongst their own experts (somewhat surprisingly, they didn't have a typography expert).

But read the following from Blog-gate, in the Jan.-Feb. 2005 issue of Columbia Journalism Review:

Consider the memos in question. They were supposed to have been written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, now dead, who supervised Bush in the Guard. We know Killian’s name was on them. We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. We don’t know through what process they wound up in the possession of a former Guardsman, Bill Burkett, who gave them to the star CBS producer Mary Mapes. Who really wrote them? Theories abound: The Kerry campaign created the documents. CBS’s source forged them. Karl Rove planted them. They were real. Some of them were real. They were recreations of real documents. The bottom line, which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty. The memos that were circulated online were digitized, scanned, faxed, and copied who knows how many times from an unknown original source. We know less about this story than we think we do, and less than we printed, broadcast, and posted.

Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.

Surprisingly, the CJR piece doesn't mention that Burkett claims to have received the memos from a complete stranger at a cattle show in Dallas back in March.

Let's assume that's true for a moment. Then to understand what happened, we need to find out who that person was, who they were working for, and where they got the content of the memos.

As I've noted before, Karl Rove -- Bush's Brain, as some call him -- has a track record of audacious dirty tricks.

I wouldn't be surprised if ultimately, the tracks for this led back to Karl.

Anyway, back to Zerbisias's column.

The last thing journalism needed was another punch to its credibility. This month, a Gallup poll in the U.S. yet again revealed that less than 25 per cent of respondents rate newspaper reporters very high or high for honesty. TV journalists fared slightly better.

As America (The Book) points out, the media have never been freer — and "the status never quo-er."

One annoying thing about Zerbisias's writing is she has yet to decide whether she's a critic of the American media or the Canadian one.

Her Dec. 26 column dealt mainly with the U.S. media. She only dealt with Canadian issues (CHOI, al-Jazeera, Fox News, Ken Peters, Stevie Cameron) towards the bottom -- and then only sketchily.

Personally, I think she likes the ambiguity. It makes her job easier (although I should be fair and say that since much of Canadians' media diet does come from U.S. sources, you can't completely wall it off).

That being said, does the Gallup poll, for example, apply in Canada? I suspect not. But the Toronto Star is a Canadian paper, overwhelmingly read by a Canadian audience. Is that audience going to assign the same level of credibility to Canadian journos if, when reading media criticism, it only sees figures from U.S. polls?

I personally don't believe that our credibility is as low -- the Brad Evensons and Gillian Cosgroves of this world aside. And if it is higher than our U.S. counterparts, why wouldn't Zerbisias mention that?

Maybe Antonia should write two year-end columns: One on the U.S. media and one on our home and native land. And if there's differences in performance, good or bad, I think she would do her audience a favour by exploring why that is.