Soccer Dad

Well, duh

via memeorandum
Mark Halperin from Time says that the media bias this election was unprecedented.

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.

At the conference this was one of the defenses:

"The biggest bias in the press is towards effectiveness," said Heilemann, who is authoring a book on the 2008 race along with Halperin.

"We love things that are smart."

Because Obama's campaign was generally so well run, he argued, the press tended to applaud even his negative tactics.

"We'll scold you for being negative," Heilemann said, "but if it seems to be working, the tone of your coverage becomes more positive."

So when someone makes a gaffe, that would not be smart, right? So where was the media after the Vice-Presidential debate? Part of the Obama campaign's effectiveness lay in the fact that the media wasn't at all curious about its mistakes.

Four years ago during the campaign Evan Thomas of Newsweek claimed that the media bias then was worth 15 points (!) to Kerry/Edwards. (He later revised that figure down to 5 points.) How much do you figure the media was worth to Obama/Biden this year?

Flopping Aces:

These people twisted stories, disregarded stories, and lied about stories in their campaign to get Obama elected and NOW....now they realize the error of their ways?

Forget about criticizing him. That'll never happen, unless he appoints a token Republican who isn't a media darling.