It helps plenty, because it highlights the fact that one party is slandering another. Even though they're both equally bad. You have a finite amount of worrying

It helps plenty, because it highlights the fact that one party is slandering another. Even though they're both equally bad. You have a finite amount of worrying in you, so shifting your focus to something else helps them get away with more themselves. To my mind this means that when such news comes from a party that is just a pot calling a kettle black, that's quite close to evidence of a guilty conscience.