Winston Churchill said: ?A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.? That was in the pre-digital age.

Now we enjoy a 300-channel, ever-connected world. Today that lie is around the world and knocking at the door before the truth has even fetched the morning paper. In fact, before that paper is even printed, the lie has probably bounced around the TV, radio and Internet echo chamber for hours.

A recent example of this occurred as Barbra Streisand was being honored with something called the Humanitarian Award. She took the opportunity -- in true humanitarian fashion -- to lash out at conservatives.

?[Conservatives] can take a lie huckstered by The Heritage Foundation,? Streisand announced, ?repeat it on Fox, hit it on Limbaugh, print it in the Wall Street Journal, until it?s coming out of every media outlet imaginable. Repeating lies over and over doesn?t make them any more true. But it does make people believe the lies a little more until finally they stop demanding the truth.?

Streisand?s scenario is pure fantasy.

For one thing, Heritage doesn?t lie. In fact, many of our critics, while taking issue with our viewpoints, praise our rigorous devotion to accuracy. There?s a reason the media sought out our analysts for more than 2,500 interviews last year: Those reporters know what we are going to say is factual. Even though they may disagree with us politically, they still want to hear the facts.

Streisand also errs by dragging up the old ?vast right-wing conspiracy? Hillary Clinton made famous. Talk about repeating a lie over and over.

Mind you, I certainly wish Heritage could fire up a media assembly line and crank out favorable news coverage. But in fact, the media tend to be liberal, not conservative.

Sure, talk radio and Web ?blogs? have made conservative ideas more influential. And on cable, Fox News does seem to have a conservative flavor, especially in contrast to its more liberal counterparts. Continued...