Over the past several weeks, we have been treated to a festival of selective reporting. In the Middle East, Israel was hammered with headlines claiming a massacre of hundreds, if not thousands in Jenin. The charges proved false. In a revealing example, Israeli surveillance cameras captured a mock funeral, replete with a walking "corpse," that had been staged in the battered city to manipulate world opinion.

Yet, the global media remained oddly unmoved by such facts. "Sometimes," a Palestinian lectured the Associated Press, "we call it a massacre when you kill one innocent person." Few openly conceded they had been bamboozled by pro-Arab propaganda.

California's mammoth state budget shortfall can hardly be compared to Middle Eastern life and death struggles. Yet, the press treatment of the growing crisis increasingly exhibits an oddly similar distaste for common sense and logic.

Consider the almost willful lack of connection most reporters make between the fact that California is ruled by an overwhelming Democratic legislative majority (and the first Democratic governor in 32 years) and the state's abysmal financial condition. Last week it was announced that Sacramento now faces a $22 billion budget shortfall, $10 billion more than even the most pessimistic observers projected only a few weeks ago. A whopping 25 percent of the state budget is at risk.

"The reason," a radio news reporter all too typically reasoned, "is that revenues keep falling while expenses keep rising." According to a recent survey of state budget officers, however, California represents just 10 percent of the nation yet accounts for more than 40 percent of the total fiscal deficit of all states combined. Many states were hurt by America's stock market and economic downturn. Only in one-party California did matters go so terribly, awfully awry.

Or consider the guileless treatment afforded Gov. Gray Davis' decision to give back a $10,000 campaign contribution from a strip club owner. When a reporter apparently found out about the donation, the governor's staff sped into full damage control. This particular contribution, they proclaimed, "just didn't pass the smell test."

But what did? Davis, who pursues fundraising with an almost frightening intensity, has long been suspected of drawing too fine a line between his duties as a lawmaker and his personal ambitions. Rather than applaud a transparently opportunistic media moment, perhaps it might have been useful to examine the record $42 million worth of checks the governor didn't refuse since taking office in late 1998.

Davis, for instance, accepted tens of thousands of dollars from energy firms like Duke even as he was denouncing them as "profiteers" who were stealing the state's consumers blind. His war chest includes hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies like Enron and Global Crossing, infamous corporate failures that gutted the retirement reserves of the very same "little guys" with whom the governor purportedly identifies.

Give the money back? "I had to fight Enron tooth and nail," Davis told the Sacramento Bee. "I see no reason to give back their resources."

His campaign took money from Philip Morris while big tobacco was being pilloried in state advertisements as a reptilian child killer. He vetoed a bill banning timber clear cutting just after lumber firms paid $67,000 into his campaign. The California Public Employees Retirement System, a multibillion dollar fund laced with Davis appointees, poured $100 million into a vineyard company that hosted a lavish fundraiser for the governor despite ongoing state environmental efforts to curb winery development.

Much like the Bush Administration's response to the Enron fiasco, Davis supporters insist that the governor's appetite for campaign contributions only affects politics, not policy. Yet, in 2001, a $115,000 donation from a development company led to approval of a hotly contested reservoir project in the Sacramento Delta. The governor's office successfully killed a bill that would have protected bank depositor privacy after top-drawer financial firms poured over a half million into the Davis campaign. Late last year, Davis refused to support a key teachers union bill after the group rebuffed his repeated demands for a $1 million campaign contribution.

Just 44 big donors account for about 30 percent of all Davis campaign funds. Three, including one without a college degree, have been rewarded with appointments as University of California regents. Others include a bevy of state-regulated firms such as telecommunications, insurance, water technology purveyors, land development and financial services companies. The influential 21st Century Commission, a body that advises the governor on housing, tax, development and transportation policies, is jam-packed with big Davis campaign contributors.

Could the governor's fundraising be linked with California's financial problems? Perhaps. Most of his legislative critics are effectively silenced by the threat of punitive vetoes or a sense of party loyalty. Blessed with a solidly pro-Democrat statewide media, Davis' obsessive pursuit of donors faces little sustained criticism or other scrutiny that might contain unsound fiscal policies.

According to the non-partisan California Journal, for example, from June to December, 2000, at the very height of the energy crisis, Davis still found time to raise over $6 million in campaign funds, an almost unbelievable $5,500 per hour. Amid the panic of the moment, the governor committed the state to a series of absurdly overpriced energy contracts, all of which he now wants to rescind. Might California have been better served had Davis given such matters his full attention?

Pork barrel politics also add to the ghastly budget outlook. Davis recently rewarded his biggest contributor, the prison guards union, by canceling state contracts with far less expensive, but privately managed inmate facilities. Worried about his re-election, he signed a multi-billion dollar workers' compensation law he had previously vetoed several times to curry favor with other union contributors. Recently the story broke that Oracle, another Davis campaign contributor, got a cushy $95 million software contract from the governor's technology office that will cost California millions in unneeded services.

Still, the press seems content to shrug and let matters slide -- at least until Davis successfully reclaims his seat. Meanwhile, the governor's campaign practices and state finances are like the "dead" corpse Israeli cameras caught walking. Everyone desperately wants not to notice. But it stinks all the same.