So Marv (my boss) forwards me an e-mail, and apparently we’ve gotten quite a few of these this week:

I find the implication that someone who has dedicated his or her life to serving America lacks patriotism utterly unpalatable. But reading Nedra Pickler of the AP’s Sunday smear piece against Senator Barack Obama, it appears that some in the media do not share this opinion.

No doubt that as the campaign season heats up we will hear ever more despicable attacks from conservatives desperate to retain their grip on power. I do not feel that it is the media’s place to trumpet these substance-less attacks, and I hope that in the future we can expect reporting that focuses on the candidate’s positions rather than trying to call into question how much they love the country they tirelessly serve.

Signed by a guy in Coatesville.

I’m with his sentiment, because Pickler’s piece over the weekend was downright execrable. My favorite part was where she quoted one Roger Stone - that would be this Roger Stone, veteran of Nixon’s CREEP who’s admitted to bribery and who most recently was accused of making threatening phone calls to N.Y. gov. Elliott Spitzer’s elderly father - and, who has set up an anti-Hillary group called Citizens United Not Timid.

You figure out the acronym.

So, nice guy. Go-to guy when you want to talk about patriotism, obviously - or as far as Pickler’s concerened.

But let me tell you how this works, if you’re Pickler. See, you’re an AP writer, and your bosses are counting on you to produce. Well, since you’re on the politics beat you can do that a number of ways. You can go digging, but depending on what you find, it might not endear you to the candidates, the folks you have to cover. Take this approach and you might get aced out. And if you’re aced out - you don’t produce. You don’t produce, you’re in trouble.

There’s another way.

You can snuggle up to some folks who might throw a few story ideas your way. You could snuggle up to the folks on the left - or, you could snuggle up to the folks on the right. Pickler’s fairly renowned for snuggling up to the right - she married to a guy from Fox News, to boot.

So, this is what she does; and her stories get play (newspapers looking to be “fair and balanced,” after all). She produces. Her bosses are happy. She’s happy.

No one, of course, is happier than the Roger Stones of the world.

So, the letters we got in response to this story are wholly warranted, except for one thing. Our newspaper didn’t actually run the story; it didn’t make it in. In part because it was so obvious a hit piece (and no, we didn’t run last week’s Times’ McCain thing, either).

So I appreciate the sentiment; there are a lot of papers that ran this - maybe even without much thinking about it - and it’s good to make them think about it. Newspapers are pretty famously cowed by the right these days - the right makes a lot of noise about the “liberal media” and papers bend over backwards to get this stuff in in order to say “See? See? We’re fair and balanced!”

But, you might keep your powder dry until you’ve actually checked that the paper to which you direct your ire actually ran the piece. Feel free to give us something to think about - so long as, you know, there’s actually something to think about.