Eric Boehlert at Media Matters takes the traditional media to task for a seemingly small detail, but one they all adopted to further their own narratives on John Kerry.

Kerry's speech, which was mocked in the press for being poorly stage managed (it was too wordy, pundits complained), was also badly mangled by scores of major news players who concocted the phony storyline that Kerry had shed tears of regret while announcing his plans to sit out the 2008 race.

Kerry did no such thing, but reporters and pundits went ahead and manufactured the narrative that the "emotional" and "choked up" senator became "tearful" as he publicly "let go of his White House dreams." None of that was accurate.

It's stories like this that make me grateful for the blogosphere. The traditional media is not reporting to us what's happening any more. They are parroting spin unchallenged and sketching characters that are as much a product of their creation as they are real people. The dissonance comes when we in the blogosphere can show the reality conflicting with the media narrative ("Maverick" John McCain comes to mind).