We're so proud of the media! It resisted the temptation to publish anything about KerrySex until after the rumors were denied. We'd congratulate them, but they're pretty busy congratulating themselves! Presenting the KerrySex aftermath, stage two: "We have triumphed over the forces of evil."

From Dick Polman at the Philly Inquirer, we learn that the KerrySex rumor "moved like a virus through the media bloodstream." Yuck! And, we're not sure if you're aware of this, but the internet, with its "instantaneous scandal-mongering," "threatens traditional news values." You know what that might lead to: Heather has two newspapers.

But, thank God, the mainstream media resisted the siren song of KerrySex. And, "The caution paid off, because this rumor failed the Lewinsky test." (We don't really know what that is, but it sounds sort of dirty -- and it has to involve a cigar.)

Here's the great part: That risk to American journalism traditional values? It's all our fault! OK, some credit goes to Matt Drudge, but we prefer to think of it as the product of the nefarious "Wonkette agenda," which also involves seducing children to start blogging. Polman nails us for it: "[L]ast Friday, the British, with their looser standards, weighed in. The Sun, a tabloid owned by conservative magnate Rupert Murdoch, ran the rumor and outed the woman. . . . Later Friday, Wonkette, a U.S. Web log, supplied a link to the Sun, and that put [the woman's] name in play stateside."

Bwahahaha! It's true! Sure, Matt Drudge posted the link 20 minutes later, and he has 15 million readers, but finally we get the credit we deserve for corrupting the morals of America's young people. Of course, it helped that our link was embedded with an extra-special piece of code that subliminally convinced people that every word of the Sun story was true. But we know that no one, especially not a journalist, would have found that article if we hadn't linked to it, because most American reporters believe that United Kingdom is a nearly uninhabited, barren land mass -- like Greenland, only smaller. We have it on good authority that U.S. newsrooms use a map of the world in which it is labeled simply as "rocks to the east."

With Web, facts are often trailing speedy rumors [Philadelphia Inquirer]