Isn't it odd how often it's the little things that offer the greatest insights? On March 8, Joseph Farah's column "Hollywood honors a Nazi," lamented that the Academy Awards had honored Leni Riefenstahl, who died last year at the age of 101. Academy officials did so without fanfare and without apology.

Ms. Riefenstahl was an immensely talented woman. She was also Hitler's filmmaker. Her greatest film was "Triumph des Willens" (Triumph of the Will), which showcased the sixth Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934. Using the backdrop of Albert Speer's architecture, it glorified the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. The film is still studied today by filmmakers and advertisers alike for its masterful mingling of cinematography with propaganda.

While I agree with Mr. Farah – it is troubling that Hollywood has expressed no regrets over their decision – what is more troubling to me is the reaction of the mainline press in America. A Google news search reveals a few more columns critical of the award, but then a strange transformation takes place: Criticism of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" begins to appear with references to the cinematic techniques of Leni Riefenstahl, "the Nazi propagandist."

I don't know how to put this delicately. The question has gnawed at me since I read Mr. Farah's column. Have Nazi propaganda techniques somehow become so embedded in American newsrooms that the practitioners don't even recognize the techniques any more, and are comfortable with them as a part of daily journalism?

• A news cameraman does multiple soundbite takes on Sen. John Kerry's latest musings: "In Ohio the other day, he [Kerry] was trying to attack Bush's economic policy for the benefit of the television crews and staggered through three minutes of puffy incoherence. At the end, the CBS guy said none of what he'd droned was usable and would he mind trying again. Eventually, they coached the senator into a soundbite: 'It's the biggest say-one-thing-do-another administration in the history of the country.' He likes this so much he now uses it all the time" ("John Kerry is all tied up in nuances," by Mark Steyn, Feb. 3, 2004, London Telegraph).

• According to those who have worked for it, the Associated Press provides different articles about the same news event, to satisfy the political leanings of the newspapers that subscribe to it. Thus, accused spy Susan Lindauer, who began as a Democratic staffer to at least four different elected officials and a reporter for two major news outlets, becomes in one AP story "a distant cousin of Bush presidential adviser Andrew Card." Say what?

• The media allows pressure groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association to define how their cause will be depicted in news stories. Thus the Catholic Church does not have a problem with homosexual priests abusing young boys. Its real problem is "sexual abuse," the same amorphous problem that exists in sports, workplaces and schools.

  But with America in the midst of a "same-sex marriage" debate, isn't same-sex abuse against children on a scale this vast something the public should be aware of? Groups that oppose the favored pressure group are unfavorably defined by the pressure group's reporting guidelines. Editors and journalists apparently have no problem with the foxes guarding the news-language hen house.

• A pair of lesbian reporters in San Francisco take time out from their busy reporting schedule to get "married" ... to each other. Their boss, of course, had no idea lesbians had been assigned to provide impartial news coverage of homosexual issues over the past three years.

• Then, we have Jayson Blairs emerging with increasing frequency at newspapers across the country. These boys don't have to twist their facts, they simply rely on their imaginations. Perhaps they've reasoned that journalism has become such a twisted mass of deception that it couldn't possibly suffer further from utter fabrication? Perhaps they're right?

You see, when a movie faithfully depicting the events recorded in four eyewitness accounts of Jesus' death can be equated with propaganda, while "Bowling for Columbine" and other leftist fantasies can win awards for truth-telling, the Nazi propagandists have won the war.