Politico's Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris tries to explain why the media, including themselves, are extremely biased towards Barack Obama and against John McCain:
The Republican once was the best evidence of how little ideology matters. Even during his “maverick” days, McCain was a consistent social conservative, with views on abortion and other cultural issues that would have been odds with those of most reporters we know. Yet he won swooning coverage for a decade from reporters who liked his accessibility and iconoclasm and supposed commitment to clean politics.
Now he is paying. McCain’s decision to limit media access and align himself with the GOP conservative base was an entirely routine, strategic move for a presidential candidate. But much of the coverage has portrayed this as though it were an unconscionable sellout.
Since then the media often presumes bad faith on McCain’s part. The best evidence of this has been the intense focus on the negative nature of his ads, when it is clear Obama has been similarly negative in spots he airs on radio and in swing states.
It is not our impression that many reporters are rooting for Obama personally. To the contrary, most colleagues on the trail we’ve spoken with seem to find him a distant and undefined figure. But he has benefited from the idea that negative attacks that in a normal campaign would be commonplace in this year would carry an out-of-bounds racial subtext. That’s why Obama’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was basically a nonissue in the general election.
Journalists’ hair-trigger racial sensitivity may have been misplaced, but it was not driven by an ideological tilt.
Are they really saying that Obama gets a free pass because journalists are worried about coming across as racist?
Now, this 'distant and undefined figure' is the massive favorite to become the next President of the United States. Journalists have not attempted to get beyond his campaign's hype. They don't know him, and they don't attempt to get to know him, before he is swept into the most powerful position in the world.
Don't get me wrong. McCain has run an awful campaign. Obama has run a brilliant one, which at least offsets some of his inexperience factors.
Honestly, I think McCain would be a perfectly mediocre president, especially facing a hostile Congress which would call on his talent for compromise and bipartisanship. I think his experience will keep him from massive blunders (counter-argument: his own campaign!), but I also doubt he will do particularly well.
With Obama, it can go both ways. He may be as brilliant as he comes across. He may become a fantastic president. Just as likely, or even more, he may now reach his incompetence level and come crashing down as an absolutely Carteresquely horrible one. Unfortunately, no attempt has been made by the media to really examine this possibility before it, quite possibly, happens.
7:29:05 AM 
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