The Liberal Media

Quite often in this election year we have heard Democrats complaining about a biased media. This is humorous, considering that for years they've argued that there couldn't possibly be such a bias - how could such a vast system of dissemination absorb a singular outlook?

Now, liberals are complaining about the media being so biased against Barack. Here's one theory about why that would be -

because the press, as Frank Rich noted in an excellent column on Sunday, are still hopelessly attached to a "Democrats divided" narrative.

That's really odd. It seems that the liberal Rich is confirming the fact that the media can get caught up in a story line and tilt stories in some sort of unconscious, yet unified way.

Barack Obama says John McCain has gotten a free ride from his friends in the media. A good case in point: how ABC reported the news of its latest poll, which showed Obama leading McCain, 48 percent to 42 percent. Good for Obama and bad for McCain, right? Well, not according to ABC News. George Stephanopoulos sees "danger signs" for Obama.

But it is the job of the media to provide context to the facts being presented. It would be poor reporting to do a story on Barack's 6 point bounce, for example, without noting that a normal bounce would be more than twice that amount. That does spell trouble for Barack.

"NBC Nightly News" was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede.

A female stampede, however, or an hispanic one, from Hillary to Barack is expected, indeed required, for there to even be a contest. The press has been reporting this stampede excessively as if it means something - the only thing that matters about the stampede is incremental. If McCain can claim one or two percent more of these groups than he should, that's where the story lies.

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it's an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

The Clintons, you'll recall, complained about the media being in the bag for Obama, a theory propelled by the writers of Saturday Night Live, who delivered some fine material based on that premise.

The happy part of all this is - if the media can be a McCain fanclub, according to liberals, then they've given up their favorite argument against a liberal bias in the media.