This story started going around the blogosphere this morning.  It seems that some grammar checking or spell checking software changed “shroud of objectivity” to what got posted below And, of course, many, many people copied it without reading.

The fact that NPR felt obliged to put Stewart’s rally off limits to its staff but didn’t feel it necessary to issue such an order for Glenn Beck’s rally does obviously raise the presumption that NPR staffers would be interested in the former and not the later — ergo, NPR staffers are liberally inclined. (I have no problem with that, only that it is masked under NPR’s Shroud of Turin Objectivity.) Shepard merely repeats and accepts the company line without real discussion of it. She doesn’t deal with the journalistic questions I raised, only repeats the cant of freshman journalism seminars about objectivity:

These posts don’t dry up. They just surface over and over and over thanks to Google. For the lack of editing whole theories might develop.