Just the facts, ma'am

I've been buried in copy-editing Strawberry Days, but be sure to check out the nifty job of real journalism that Carla at Preemptive Karma has been producing this week regarding the Washington gubernatorial election, following up on her nice job of fact-checking the right-wing blogosphere last week.

She's mostly been debunking the shaky work at Stefan Sharkansky's Sound Politics, most notably with a post further debunking claims of hanky-panky in the mailing of military ballots, as well as an earlier post with more data on the subject.

Commenting in the thread at the previous post, Stefan responded thus:

I know you're a skeptical journalist. Perhaps if you applied the same skepticism to King County government that you apply to others who question it, we'd all learn something.

Skepticism is healthy, especially for journalists or those who attempt to practice it. What's not healthy is leveling charges of criminal behavior against otherwise respected public officials without any evidence to support those accusations (and I'm talking specifically about charges of fraud here). That's not being skeptical. It's being irresponsible.