As might have been predicted, the Obama attends radical Muslim school story I wrote about in The Telegraph recently has been followed by still more silly nonstories that are picked up by the mainstream media and presented as real issues when in fact they are just more examples of spin, half-truth and outright lies of the type that has made "swift boating" a new verb in the American political vocabulary.

Which raises a new question: When a story is a lie and outright false, why is the media so reluctant to use the words "false" and "lie"?

Case in point: The much-ballyhooed story that Nancy Pelosi has supposedly requested a luxurious military jet to fly her back and forth to her home district in San Francisco.An Associated Press story from Friday, February 9, which showed up on the Washington Post's website,  had the headline: "House GOP blast Pelosi for Plane Request." The story says that "reports swirled" about criticism that Pelosi was requesting a bigger plane than that used by her predecessor, Dennis Hastert, without saying where the reports were swirling from -- which was the Washington Times, a notably right-wing publication, and Republican members of the House trying to paint Pelosi as a luxury-loving "San Franciso liberal" out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. It's a familiar theme.

What's wrong with all that? Nothing -- except it's entirely false. Thursday, the House Sergeant-at-Arms, Wilson Livingood, issued a press release in which he stated that he -- NOT Pelosi -- had made the request for a military plane which could travel from Washington to San Francisco nonstop purely as a security issue. Pelosi herself had already said she was perfectly willing to continue flying on commercial airliners between her home and Washington, as she has done for years. But after 9/11 it had been decided that the House Speaker -- who is, after all, second in the line of succession to the presidency -- should fly on military transport for security reasons.

In the Associated Press story we are discussing here, the information about the House Sergeant-at-Arms and what he said about the whole flap does not appear until the 12th paragraph of the story -- long after two GOP critics have been quoted. And the story never bothers to do two critical things:

1. It never calls out explicitly that the statement from the House Sergeant-at-Arms completely discredits the whole supposed controversy, which it does.

2. It never points out that the Sergeant-at-Arms is NOT a political appointee. He is, instead, the chief law enforcement and security officer for the House. Livingood has held the job since 1995, having been elected by successive Congresses, first Republican-controlled and now Democratic-controlled.

Why the so-called "mainstream media" either ignores such stories -- rather than calling them out for the phonies they are -- or uncritically repeats them without bothering to do their jobs as journalists and find the facts, is a mystery.

Even worse is the inability, apparently, of much of the "mainstream media" to call a lie a lie or even use some euphemism such as "discredited" -- which is the mildest thing you can say about this whole story.

In the absence of that, it is up to every reader who wants the truth -- regardless of where his or her political sympathies lie -- to dig for himself and find out the facts, rather than accept whole cloth what they might hear on cable or on the radio or -- sadly enough -- read in the newspaper.

"Swift boating" as a political tactic won't stop until it is proved that it doesn't work. Given the dismal performance of the media in general so far, however, it is being proven that it does work. It's a sad day in journalism.