Post Post Post

The ombudsman for the Wash Post says the paper leaned way, way toward Obama.

Not surprisingly, conservative pundits wonder why this came out AFTER the election.

I was told there would be no math

We need to make Rich explain this more.
Could be the week's most intriguing post!

Hope you had a nice weekend, Megan

I have all kinds of questions on this clip from Rich. But I'll let the class discuss it. We won't watch the whole seven minutes of bickering.

Sudden Death Overtime

Joe D. had an interesting week. (You should also check out his amusing post on the way Obama disrupted football priorities.) But I'm flagging this post not just because it mentions a developing story about Pslin, but also because it reminds us to talk specifically about the nightly newcasts. I've watched A LOT of them since September and -- setting aside my occasional, warm feeling that Katie is talking directly to me -- I can't realy see any obvious tilt in the three network 'casts. Am I wrong? I mean, Katie was kind of the undoing of Palin, but not in a way that seemed like bad journalism.

Jabba's Straight Talk Hovercraft

Providently, Kasey has framed one of the OTHER pressing questions: which is more important to reporters -- ideology or access/success?

I guess one of my problems here is the fallacy of treating all the reporters the same way. Age and pecking order come into play. Joe Klein can afford to develop biases. The struggling, relatively new beat reporter may want access a lot more.

When I was starting out in the business, I would have written up Jabba the Hutt's views if he gave me access.

Cheyenne looked at the question of McCain and reporter access here with CLIP.

Welcome back Lauren

Here she delves into a kind of chicken and egg argument about media bias. In other words, do McCain problems engender bad coverage, or is it the other way around?

The clip is also from Lauren and, coming on the heels of devastating impersonation of Olbermann on SNL and coming in the context of our bias conversation, it kind of bears talking about.

Caroline on bias

She blogs about it here.

MSNBCFOXCNN

Seemingly aware of us and our mission, the Times tackled the subject of bias.

Yes we have no bias

This week we will consider, over-archingly, the question of media bias.
The accusations in this area have a way of canceling each other out.
Here is a left-leaning watchdog.
Here is a right-leaning one.
See what I mean? It's like off-setting penalties in football.

But please do click around on these watchdogs and consider the kinds of cases they make.

Neal Conan's Rules of Debate

National Public Radio takes such pains, at times, to live down its reputation as a basically left-of-center forum that it chokes off reasonable debate.
I think that happened several times, on Thursday, in this program about white supremacist activity during the campaign season.
If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, at least drag the cursor over to about 12:30, when a guy named Tom from Smithfield, R.I. phones in. Tom has a pretty reasonable question which has been asked many ways in recent weeks: is there anything about some of the recent Republican rallies that might give encouragement to hate groups? Note that host Conan treats the question almost as if it is out of bounds. He first insists that the caller can not possibly be suggesting that either McCain or Palin have ever said anything of this nature. He then insists that the only relevance of the question would be in the case of hate groups hearing something that's not really there in the rhetoric of these rallies.

The effect is one of intellectual cowardice. Tom's question is not at all exotic. A lot of us have wondered whther some of the rhetoric, especially Palin's, has implicitly invited the audiences to indulge their darkest and most sinister fantasies about who Barack Obama is and who he isn't. The talk about "real America" doesn't even seem that subtle at times. I don't mind saying that, watching some of those clips, I have found myself thinking: if some idiot shoots Obama some day, we're going to look back at these rallies and wonder whether if they gave encouragement and nourishment to the American monster of virulent racism. I think McCain has had the same thought, which is why he went through that stretch where he at least made an effort to cool down some of the hottest heads at his speeches (only to find himself getting booed by those hotheads).

Conan is clearly afraid of the whole topic. Seconds later, his guest from the Southern Poverty Law Center talks about nasty racist imagery including nooses around Obama's neck. "To be fair," Conan jumps in, there have been Sarah Palin nooses. Well, one, says the guest. But Conan's desire is pretty clear. We must at least pretend that these problems are roughly equivalent. One campaign can not possibly be more appealing to noose-sketchers than the other.

It seems to me that one of the most important questions in this whole story is the one Conan is determined to avoid. What's the overlap between the crazy, dangerous people and the people showing up and yelling back at these rallies? Do the crazy and vicious people feel emboldened when mainstream political figures say things that don't sound all that different from what the fringe groups say? Does the McCain campaign have some responsibility to worry about this? Does Palin, specifically, seem indifferent to the problem or is she now acknowledging that she might have to be a little more careful? (Even though Palin has apologized for any misunderstanding she might have created, I think we know the answer to that. Palin said last week that any criticism of her campaigning style infringes on her First Amendment rights.)

Anyway, we're apparently not going to find out on Talk of the Nation.