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The most blatant recent example of the rampant media bias against direct marketing surely was the lopsided coverage given to the more than two-year-long legal battle between anti-spammer Mark Mumma and vacation marketer Omega World Travel.

You know the drill: All marketers are scumbag spammers until proven otherwise.

In January 2005, after Mumma received a half-dozen e-mails from Omega subsidiary Cruise.com, he sent a letter threatening to sue unless the company paid him an arbitrarily set $6,250. When Omega refused to pay, Mumma began smearing Cruise.com and Omega's owners, Gloria and Daniel Bohan, by calling them spammers on his Web site.

In response, Omega sued Mumma for $3.8 million for defamation, among other things. Mumma then turned around and sued Omega under Oklahoma law and the federal Can Spam Act.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's summary judgment against Mumma, concurring that Can Spam pre-empted Mumma's claims under Oklahoma law, and that inaccuracies in Cruise.com's return-address information were too trivial to be considered in violation of federal law.

Examples of hack-job reporting in this case are legion. For example, when Omega sued Mumma for defamation, Ars Technica published a factually challenged opinion piece in March 2005 headed “Spammer sues anti-spammer for $4 million.” Actually, it was $3.8 million, but what's $200,000 when there's a smear-job headline to write?

In the piece, writer Ken Fisher concluded: “You have to wonder why Cruise.com didn't simply stop spamming this guy?” The tiniest bit of research would have revealed that Mumma refused to opt out using the mechanisms supplied, and wouldn't give his e-mail address to Omega's house lawyer John Lawless so he could get it suppressed from Cruise.com's mailings.

After the appeals court backed Omega, CNET News ran an article headlined, “Court sides with alleged ‘vacation’ spammer.”

The moment one reads that head it's clear whose side CNET is on. All the word “alleged” does is create a veneer of impartiality.

And the prizewinner for lopsided reporting in this media fiasco was “A Spammer's Revenge” in Time magazine, in which Reynolds Holding wrote that Mumma faced “the possibility of owing $3.8 million in damages for speaking his mind. And you wondered why spam was so hard to stop.”

What? Spam is difficult to stop because the owners of one company refused to sit quietly by while someone smeared them? Wow.

According to Lawless, he told Holding that Omega's program was permission-based and that someone had registered Mumma's address at Cruise.com — an inconvenient assertion that didn't make Holding's story.

Somewhat to its credit, Time published a rebuttal letter from Omega's lawyers both in the magazine and on its Web site. But the damage was already done.

Not surprisingly, blogosphere coverage of this whole business was overwhelmingly sympathetic to Mumma. Typical was a post by John Pacskowski on Good Morning Silicon Valley which read: “Mumma took on Cruise.com for its repeated unsolicited e-mail, documenting his correspondence on the Web. But instead of simply taking his name off their list, Omega World Travel, the parent company, hit Mumma with a $4 million SLAPP suit (SLAPP standing for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation).”

Or how about the following gem from TheInternetPatrol.com: “Talk about adding insult to injury. First Cruise.com, a/k/a Omega World Travel, and run by John Lawless, spams the bejeezus out of anti-spammer Mark Mumma of Oklahoma. Mumma asks Cruise.com to stop spamming him. No relief. He asks them again to stop spamming him. The spam keeps coming.”

The irresponsibility of that paragraph is jaw-dropping.

The facts that Mumma wouldn't use the multiple opt-out mechanisms offered by Omega and that he refused to supply his address so the company could do it for him are easily available online.

Mumma admitted to me during an interview that at some point he became aware his address had been supplied to Omega, yet he continued to attack the firm. He argued that since he didn't offer the address, Omega spammed him.

Throughout, news outlets and bloggers called Omega a spammer while expressing sympathy for Mumma.

In April, a jury in Virginia — a state known for taking tough legal action against spammers — awarded Omega $2.5 million in damages. This means that even a bunch of people off the street, when given the facts of the case, determined that Omega isn't a spammer. And reporters wonder why the public has about as much faith in them as it does in personal-injury lawyers.