Time isn’t allowed to critique right-wing claims even when they’re totally false. Doing that would make Rush Limbaugh and Fox News angry. So rather than pointing out what actually happened — that right-wing claims about march attendance were false and debunked by news organizations — they have to pretend that this is, as always, nothing more than an irreconcilable dispute about reality between the Right and the Left, and it’s not up to Time to tell their readers what the truth is, because that’s not their role, since they’re objective and unbiased. According to the rules of establishment journalism, there is no truth and no facts — only competing, irreconcilable claims from “the Right and the Left,” and their only job is to mindlessly repeat those claims. […]

Here, the reality — that the 9/12 crowd numbered in the “tens of thousands” — has to be dismissed as coming from “liberal sources” because, as Stephen Colbert famously pointed out, “reality has a liberal bias.” Time’s readers are thus kept in the dark about the actual facts of this matter, and are actively deceived into believing that reports from establishment journalists that debunked right-wing hyperbole are nothing more than “information from liberal sources” that should be deemed every bit as paritsan and suspect as the blatant right-wing falsehoods. That’s how American journalism typically functions.

Glenn Greenwald: Time Magazine: the liberal bias of facts