Nine days is an eternity in today's news cycle, but it isn't nearly as behind the curve as the national political press corps has been. While Tina Fey portrayed Sarah Palin as a hopeless lightweight on "Saturday Night Live" last weekend, it was Amy Poehler as Hillary Rodham Clinton who posed the more serious challenge: She suggested that the sexist media "grow a pair."

In February, another SNL skit mocked how transparently CNN news figures fawned over Barack Obama during a Democratic primary debate. "Like nearly everyone in the news media, the three of us are totally in the tank for Obama," the Campbell Brown look-alike gleefully confessed.

Some media observers noted that after the biting satire aired, reporters temporarily toughened their treatment of Mr. Obama. Will this latest, widely seen satire have the same effect?

It shouldn't, because underneath the sketch's delicious impersonations and clever dialogue lies a serious falsehood. The sketch challenges journalists to do something now to Ms. Palin that they've failed to do since Mr. Obama's very early launch of this presidential season: their jobs.

Mrs. Clinton's campaign long complained, to no avail, of rank sexism from the national media. Though a strong case could be made that the sexism came not from reporters but from commentators like the increasingly bizarre Chris Matthews, and that it wasn't anti-woman so much as it was pro-Obama, the SNL sketch endorses Mrs. Clinton's claim.

Fey-as-Palin says, "In the next six weeks I invite the media to be vigilant for sexist behavior," to which Poehler-as-Clinton adds, "although it is never sexist to question a female politician's credentials."

But it is sexist if similar questions are never raised about the credentials of the male politician. A press corps that couldn't be bothered to scrutinize Mr. Obama's past -- his record as a senator, his friendships with left-wing radicals, his lack of experience or clarity on foreign policy -- is now falling all over itself to grill Ms. Palin and dig for dirt in Alaska.

Since Mrs. Clinton's past also got the hands-off treatment, the bias here is, of course, not a new plague of sexism. It's just the most blatant display ever of the media's old, exhausted left-wing bias. But it isn't only bias. It's bias fueled by desperation to stay relevant and solvent -- a lethal mix.

This is the year that the national political media has lost its marbles, jumped the shark, blown its cover. The rot is undeniable. The American public agrees with conservatives' long-standing criticism: In a Rasmussen poll this summer, 60 percent of voters said Mr. Obama was getting more favorable media treatment than Sen. John McCain. They rank journalists' credibility above chiropractors' but below Congress.

Some journalists finally acknowledge the problem. Two days ago, National Journal senior writer Stuart Taylor stated, "I no longer trust the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis [of the campaigns] ... in an era when the noise produced by highly partisan TV hosts and blogs creates a crying need for at least one newspaper ... to play it straight."

That's because formerly respectable journalists are letting those partisan blogs set their agenda. The day before the SNL Palin-Clinton parody, the McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau released a story analyzing how the McCain campaign "systematically targets the news media." It noted that "media inquiries" about who had really given birth to baby Trig came only after the far-left blog "Daily Kos" posted the rumor that Ms. Palin faked a pregnancy to cover for her teenage daughter.

Think for a moment how absurd this is -- how widespread the conspiracy would have to be for the Palins to pull it off. But "old media" types desperate to remain relevant took the bloggers' bait and went fishing.

As even-handed as Mr. Taylor strives to be, every instance he cites of misinformation about Mr. Obama comes from McCain ads and every instance he cites of misinformation about Ms. Palin or Mr. McCain comes from journalists. He castigates ABC veteran Charlie Gibson for the false assertion, which "viewers had no way of knowing," that Ms. Palin had said U.S. soldiers headed to Iraq were on "a task from God."

Viewers also have no way of knowing, unless they read the full transcripts online, that passages revealing Ms. Palin as knowledgeable and nuanced on foreign policy were deleted from ABC's broadcast. Such dishonesty does long-term damage.

The bumper sticker my union handed out last year during labor negotiations says, "Democracy Depends on Journalism." It does. Some of us toiling in the local trenches and doing more with less every day have the right, like Americans in general, to deplore how miserably the stars in the journalistic firmament have abused their public trust.