Mr McCain has to contend with the US media’s increasingly shameless bias in favour of Mr Obama.The article he cites notes that Obama gets more media attention than McCain. But does that signify a bias in favor of Obama? It's worth pointing out that far more of the media attention McCain gets is positive attention. Consider this example. People are still criticizing Hillary Clinton for proposing a gas tax holiday, while everyone is ignoring the fact that McCain - an actual nominee and current candidate - has been pushing the idea even harder.
See? Sometimes no attention is good attention.
People have tended to ignore the fact that the mainstream media has shifted substantially to the right over the past decade. Part of that is probably due to Rupert Murdoch, but I'm guessing a larger part has to do with the internet. Lots of the middle- and upper-middle-class college-educated liberals who used to read the Washington Post have decamped for the blogosphere and Google News, leaving big media outlets with a suddenly much more conservative reader base. That's why the Washington Post has a feature called "Right Matters" that regularly dishes venomous right-wing attacks onto the front page, but no corresponding liberal outlet. Check it out if you don't believe me.
Clive Crook and other casual observers of the American political scene seem to think it's still the 1980s, when the media still had a liberal bias. Times have changed, guys. In fact, my guess is that they changed pretty abruptly in 2004, when everyone was talking about the permanent Republican majority and the collapse of American liberalism. America prepared for a conservative age; the big media apparently prepared a little too well. Now it's McCain, not Obama, who often gets a free pass.
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