September was a bad month to be a liberal journalist. Yeah, I said it. I’m a liberal, and I’m a journalist. But that doesn’t mean I have any less of a beef with Dan Rather.

Who knows what Rather — CBS’s square-headed, monotone Franken-anchor — was thinking when he reported a story about President Bush’s National Guard service that was based on forged documents. He didn’t help matters when he continued to defend his reporting in the face of mounting evidence that the documents were bogus. Was he practicing the newly fashionable “advocate journalism,” or was he just lazy and gullible? I’m guessing it’s some from column A, some from column B. But we’ll never really know if Rather had nefarious intentions. What is clear is that he didn’t do journalism — or journalists — any favors.

Naturally, the Rather retraction got plenty of play on Fox News, where for weeks, everyone took turns scolding and shaming CBS, and speculating that the story had been planted by the Kerry campaign. (As if Fox — the research and publicity arm of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth — is somehow innocent of advocate journalism.)

To Sean Hannity and company, the Rather episode is just further proof of the lengths the liberal media will go to bring down the president. And it’s exactly what they need to justify their existence as a partisan news organization — Fox: the first line of defense against all the liberal wieners making stuff up about our fearless, decisive Commander-in-Chief.

As a corollary to the accidental favor he did for Fox News, Rather did the rest of the journalistic community a colossal disservice. It’s been a bad few weeks for the media, but in truth, it’s been a worse few years. Not only have we had the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass business, but since the 2000 elections and September 11, mainstream news outlets have been all too focused on journalism’s dangerous new goal: balance. And Rather’s mistake is not likely to help reverse the trend.

In the effort to appear non-partisan, the mainstream media has abandoned analysis as an integral part of newsgathering, replacing it with a fragile, postmodern concept of “balance,” which assumes that no one is right and no one is wrong, so everyone should get their say. The result is that the media is no longer a filter, as it should be, but a conduit — a hands-off middleman between politics and the people, parroting each party’s talking points.

I’m not talking about the balance Fox News purports to provide, balancing the supposed liberal media with ultra-conservative rant. I’m talking about the impulse that has taken over the press to give equal time to the loony Left and the ridiculous Right, instead of just shooting straight.

Politicians are generally full of shit — our job as journalists should be to cut through it, not garnish it with a sprig of parsley and serve it to our readers. Sometimes the Left is right (Swift Boat Veterans), and sometimes the Right is right (Kerry changes his mind). The mainstream media needs to focus less on getting it balanced and more on getting it right.

The first step is regaining the public’s trust. And incidents like the Rather retraction aren’t helping.

henrypb