Woo-hoo!
Just in time to break my doom-and-gloom mood comes this: a huge victory for RER in a national journalism contest. The Cousin Who's On TV is taking home a Best in Show in the National Headliner Awards -- a damn prestigious contest, a very small notch below a Pulitzer or a Murrow -- for exposing the half-truths found in South Carolina's political ads. The fact that politicians are liars isn't news. But RER's reports did more than simply call names; they pointed out the half-truths AND the complete truths, and educated viewers on the visual tricks that can take a truth and twist it into a falsehood. Go here to see for yourself.

This is incredibly sophisticated reporting, and, I'm sure, incredibly time-consuming. As the judges said in the citation, it's what all journalists should be doing every day. But RER took what we should be doing and did it better than everybody else.