Fooling Yourself

What do Todd Akin and Chicago Tribune have in common?  They both tell themselves lovely lies so they can sleep at night.

Was Akin engaged in "an intentional deception"? That seems highly implausible, as it implies both that he knew that what he was saying was false and that he expected others to believe it was true. It's much likelier that, like Knowles and his staff at the Tribune, Akin was misinformed and made "a careless mistake."

It would be preposterous, however, to deny that Akin was biased. Indeed it seems obvious that he believed the falsehood in question because that falsehood made it easier to justify his ideological position to himself (and, he mistakenly believed, to others).

The falsehood from the Chicago Tribune had to do with a blatantly misleading graphic and story about "assault weapons".  

While we can usually count on the media to point out when politicians are telling themselves and us fantastic fabrications, who can we count on to point out when the media is equally full of it?