Throughout the day there has been a lot of talk in regards to the news that the memo was traced to a member of Florida Senator Mel Martinez's office.

Over at National Review's The Corner, Jonah Goldberg said this:

I think it's probably good news -- or at least there's a positive side to the fact -- that the memo turned out to be real. It will probably caution some bloggers that simply because something is politically inconvenient and doesn't have an obvious explanation, that doesn't mean there's a dishonest liberal/media conspiracy at work. Better to learn that sort of lesson on a minor episode like this than something that grabs more attention.

But the question is, what did we learn?  While there's no question that a number of bloggers went a tad overboard once it was found out that ABC News and the Washington Post could not verify the statements they made in their respective articles on this topic, that doesn't mean Darling's admission vindicates them. 

They still couldn't verify any of their statements before Darling's admission.  Usually a journalist writes an article based on facts he/she can verify beforehand to be true, and the MSM didn't do that in this case.  ABC News or the WP couldn't do this, or they would have done so within a couple of days after being challenged (and a couple of days is actually giving them more time than is really needed).  Thus, they aren't off the hook.

Tim Graham responds appropriately:

The real lesson of the Schiavo memo is this: to the liberal media, every piece of internal Republican communication is potential news meat, especially if it can be used to make Republicans look bad. (Hopefully, freshman legislators learn this at orientation...) Every internal Democratic memo leak is clearly a Republican plot that should not see the light of day. The Washington Post and assorted other liberal apple-polishers may have accuracy on their side on this one, but they don't have balance.

And contrast the reaction of the media with the Schiavo memo and the Rockerfeller memo.  The media didn't initially care who created the Schiavo memo and more or less assumed it was geniune based on the word of the Democrats.  That, after all, is what started this whole fracas, because they couldn't back up their article when challenged and in some cases backed off of their assertions.

But the Rockefeller memo is a different story.  Instead of criticizing Sen. Rockefeller for politicizing intelligence for political gain - precisely what the Republicans are being criticized for in the Schaivo case - the media was more interested on who leaked the memo and how.  The one constant between both memos is that the media followed the Democrats' lead, whom wanted to use the leak as a smokescreen for Rockefeller's obvious exploitation of national intelligence.

Yet, there's no leftist bias in the media.  Right.

Over at The Kerry Spot (Geraghty, dude, it's time to change the name of the blog), Jim Geraghty posts a statement from a reader:

The Washington Post is getting all the credit for solving the Schiavo memo mystery, but in reality, it was the Washington Times that did the digging and pushing to find out what happened. Mike Allen of the WaPost was only able to write his story after the pressure from two Washington Times Capitol Hill reporters forced Martinez to get to the bottom of this and release his statement last night to all media outlets.

The Washington Times published a front-page story that reflected lots of leg work on the story by reporters Stephen Dinan and Brian DeBose. They contacted all 100 senators (either in person as they came off the floor or though their staff) and discovered that not one Republican had ever seen the memo and only one Democrat did — Harkin...

A fair reading of how this story has played out shows that the Washington Post misreported the story and the Washington Times set the record straight.

And Geraghty says:

Needless to say, the usual suspects are declaring this complete vindication for the Post. Yeah, yeah, and the Burkett memos might have been typed on a $17,500 typesetting machine that just happened to be in a Texas Air National Guard office.

Exactly.