THANK YOU, JACK SHAFER, for explaining your role in the fight between Rush Limbaugh and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). But your story (“News Bites,” 10/21), like those of the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz and everyone else who publicized FAIR’s “study,” fails to explain FAIR’s own history of declarations in blatant disregard for factual correctness, most importantly its role in the hoax that domestic violence increases dramatically on Super Bowl Sunday. FAIR’s idea of self-defense was to declare that it never claimed to have a study, only a couple of anecdotal newspaper articles, to support its claim.

You may pooh-pooh the idea of a FAIR/Clinton conspiracy (and the organization does seem to revile him as a capitalist running dog), but the coincidence of FAIR’s criticism of Clinton (along with the Post-published bleatings of the hapless Diane Rehm for talk show accuracy monitors) must have led to making the FAIR study more newsworthy to outlets like the Post, Newsweek, Knight-Ridder, and the Associated Press, ad nauseam. None of these had the sense to realize that publicizing a study on accuracy from these discredited hoaxmeisters is like publishing music criticism by Milli Vanilli.

Falls Church, Va.