Press Bias: It's Real. It's Everywhere. Get Over It.

Is there anything that's both more pointless and more irresistible than arguing about press bias? Each side seems incapable of perceiving any bias except the kind it disagrees with, and neither side has even shown the slightest ability to change the other's mind.

Are most journalists liberal? Overwhelmingly, as Slate illustrated yesterday in a poll of how its employees plan to vote. Of the site's 57 staffers and contributors, 55 are voting for Barack Obama, versus one for John McCain and one for Bob Barr. That's consistent with research showing journalists donating money to Democrats over Republicans at a ratio of 15 to 1.

On the other hand, just because journalists favor a candidate privately doesn't mean they'll pull punches in their coverage. Without a doubt, the piece of reporting from this election cycle most damaging to Obama was the disclosure of his remarks about small-town voters being bitter -- and that came from the ultra-liberal Huffington Post. Politico considered all the angles yesterday and concluded, "[O]f the factors driving coverage of this election -- and making it less enjoyable for McCain to read his daily clip file than for Obama -- ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil."

"As it happens, McCain's campaign is going quite poorly and Obama's is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own."

This point was made in a slightly different way on Monday night at a forum on election coverage hosted by the Smith Family Foundation and the Fordham Federalist Society. Steve Rendell, director of the left-leaning watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, said, "So what if Barack Obama has gotten better coverage? Does that have to be bias? They're confusing bias with bad press."

The most interesting portion of the discussion came when National Review writer Byron York tried to defend the focus of the political press on questions such as whether Obama was in church when Rev. Jeremiah Wright said "God damn America," or whether his adolescent drug use was heavier than he has admitted.

I think this kind of lament that we don't spend enough time covering policy issues is displaced. I think voters don't make their decisions based on policy issues.... I believe almost all voting decisions end up being character decisions, because we elect presidents to handle problems that we don't know about.... [Voters] put it all in the Cuisinart and they come up with their vote, and I don't have a problem with it.

Doesn't have a problem with it, that is, when Democrats are the victims of such coverage. In his opening remarks, York blasted The New York Times for a recent report suggesting that McCain is a distant husband who didn't know about her painkiller addiction and forgot to buy her birthday gifts.

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