Howard Kurtz had Bernard Goldberg on his Reliable Sources show (CNN, 2/22/09), weeks after the erratic right-wing media critic blew off his show.  You could have had a better conversation about pro-Obama media bias with the drunk on the next barstool.

For example, when Kurtz says:

I think sometimes you're selective in your evidence. For example, you write about Deborah Howell; she's the former ombudsman at my newspaper, the Washington Post. You say, "She waited until after the election to write about the tilt on the Post op-ed page toward Barack Obama." But--and she did, but on August 3, Deborah Howell wrote about the huge imbalance in photos favoring Obama at the Washington Post. On August 17, she wrote that Obama had a 3-1 advantage over McCain in front page stories. So she didn't entirely wait until after the election.

...it's really not much of a response for Goldberg to say:

No. But this was the--this was the information that would have done us a --it didn't do us any good after the election, Howie. I mean, it was nice that she wrote it. It was nice that she acknowledged what just about everybody out in America already understood, that the media did side with one candidate over another.

And when Kurtz tells Goldberg:

You say that the media during the campaign didn't show enough interest in Obama's longtime relationship with the "unhinged," as you put it, Jeremiah Wright, but as you acknowledge in the book, the tapes of those "God damn America" sermons were first aired by ABC's Brian Ross, who is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media establishment. And that that story, it seemed to me, kind of dominated the campaign news for several weeks.

...Goldberg's response is: "It only dominated the campaign after the tapes came out. And the tapes came out way, way late in the campaign."  The story of Wright's sermons should have dominated the campaign before the tapes of the sermons came out?  Not to mention that nine months before the election is not exactly "way, way late in the campaign."

Noam Chomsky points out that a Boston Globe analysis (11/9/08) of the Obama victory claims that the president-elect owes nothing to "traditional Democratic constituencies" like labor, women, ethnic minorities and the peace movement, because a "grassroots army of millions"--seemingly unconnected to such constituencies--"propelled" Obama's win.

It's worth noting, however, that this idea of a Democratic Party set free from the voting blocs that support it is a longstanding dream of corporate media and the political establishment--represented in the Globe piece by corporate Democrat Steve McMahon and conservative think-tanker Norman Ornstein. Ornstein, in fact, offers the same argument in the paper that he gave to CNN (11/14/92) during a similar round of "liberal interest group" bashing after Bill Clinton's election in 1992, when Ornstein claimed that Clinton "enters office with the fewest debts owed to interest groups in his own party of any Democratic president in modern times."

But the reality is not exactly as corporate media dream it. The Globe quotes McMahon--who it identifies as a "Democratic strategist," but not as a flak for PhRMA, the prescription drug lobby--as saying that Obama "owes nothing to anyone except the people who elected him." That's not actually how politics works, as any corporate lobbyist knows full well, but it's instructive to look at who the voters were who "propelled" Obama's victory.

Among white voters, according to exit polls, Obama lost by 12 percentage points, but he more than made up this deficit with his margins with African-American (91 points), Latino (36) and Asian (27) and "other" (35) voters. Women gave Obama a decisive 13-point advantage, compared to his narrow 1-point win among men.

Obama won among those making less than $50,000 a year by a 22-point margin; the votes of those who made more than $50,000 were evenly split. Union households went for the Democrat by a 20-point margin, vs. 4 points for non-union households. Seventy-six percent of those who disapprove of the Iraq War supported Obama; 86 percent of Iraq War supporters went for McCain.

Obviously, voters' opinions don't translate directly into politicians' actions; we'd live in a much different world if they did. But voters do matter enough that corporate media routinely try to wish them away.

Tom Brokaw, the interim host of NBC's Meet the Press, and NBC analyst Chuck Todd expressed bafflement on last Sunday's Meet the Press (10/26/08) at how Latinos had "turned on the Republican Party" and their "friend" John McCain:

TODD: I mean, this, this Hispanic--one of the things we--underreported story of the cycle is how Hispanics have just turned on the Republican Party, hurting John McCain. Frankly....

BROKAW: Who is a friend of theirs.

TODD: Who is a friend of theirs.

BROKAW: Right.

TODD: You know, this is a Shakespearean--you know, the S...

BROKAW:  Right.

It's hard to know exactly where Todd was going in identifying this as "Shakespearean"--perhaps he was likening Latinos turning on and "hurting" their "friend" McCain to the famous scene of betrayal in Julius Caesar, in which the Roman leader's friend Marcus Brutus collaborates in Caesar's assassination?

The analogy suggests that, even as the GOP presidential campaign sputters, McCain is now facing treachery from the very people who were his allies.

Et tu Jose and Maria?

Where would Latinos be if they didn't have pundits like Todd and Brokaw to let them who their friends are!

Back in the real world, where issues have an impact on how people vote--it would appear that the pundits may have the story completely backwards. A new report from the Center for American Progress suggests that Latinos actually stand to lose out economically under McCain's economic policies.

But then, pundits have rarely been known to let actual issues get in the way of their horserace storyline.

Analysts have projected that Barack Obama's ad spending would this week "surpass the $188 million Mr. Bush spent in his 2004 campaign."

During the last two weeks of the election, the Obama campaign has budgeted $30 million for ads in contested states, according to MSNBC. Last week alone, he also spent about $12 million on national networks and national cable channels.

While Obama's ad spending has far outpaced McCain's, McCain and the RNC have also been doing their bit to line corporate media coffers. Last week, McCain spent $9.4 million on ads in key battleground states, and this week MSNBC reports that he's spending more than that. The RNC is spending about $1 million a day between now and election day on pro-Republican/anti-Democrat ads.

On CNN's Reliable Sources (10/19/08), host Howard Kurtz and Time magazine's Mark Halperin had the following exchange:

KURTZ: Mark Halperin, we learned this morning that Barack Obama in the month of September raised $150 million.... If a Republican had not taken public financing and had raised all that money, and the Democrat was struggling financially, wouldn't we see a lot of stories about one candidate essentially trying to buy the election?

HALPERIN: We would. We'd also see a lot of stories about his going back on his word saying that he would accept the public money and would reach out to Senator McCain to try to work out a deal. So I think this is a case of a clear, unambiguous double standard, and any reporter who doesn't ask themselves, why is that, why would it be different if it's a Republican, I think is doing themselves and our profession and our democracy a disservice.

KURTZ: I think that's an excellent point, and that's the point we're going to end on.

A bigger "disservice" to democracy and journalism would be misrepresenting reality, which Halperin and Kurtz are doing here. McCain is not "struggling financially." He has raised millions of dollars for hybrid "victory" funds that funnel large donations to the RNC and various state parties. Factoring in those donations, it is not at all clear that McCain is significantly behind in the fundraising race. What's more, had Obama accepted public financing, it would seem likely that the GOP would have a major financial advantage.

Even more bizarre is Halperin's contention that if a Republican had raised money the way Obama has, he would be pilloried by the media. The double standard argument makes little sense, because we did see a lot of misleading stories about Obama "going back on his word" when he declined to take public financing, and he was severely criticized by the pundits and editorialists; a "flip-flop of epic proportions," according to PBS liberal Mark Shields, and Washington Post columnist David Broder (6/26/08) wrote that Obama "was rightly criticized for rigging the system in his favor." Such criticisms continue to this day.

As for all the stories we would see about a Republican candidate trying to buy the election: In New York City in 2005, the billionaire Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg outspent his opponent 8-to-1 in order to win re-election.  Did we see a lot of stories about Bloomberg buying the election?  No, we see the city's media moguls pushing to change the election rules so he can do it again.

Any lingering hope you may have harbored for corporate pundits to rise above their infatuation with John McCain running mate Sarah Palin will surely be dashed by Rich Lowry's titillated take (National Review Online, 10/3/08) on her debate performance--quoted in full:

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It's one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O'Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." (more...)

The affliction that causes national political commentators to project their own perceptions onto the public-- let's call it Pundit Projection Syndrome--is affecting David Gregory's ability to come to grips with the fact that the public just wasn't as into John McCain's and Sarah Palin's debate performances as he was. Last night on his MSNBC show, Race for the White House With David Gregory (10/6/08), the anchor demonstrated his confusion in a discussion with liberal-leaning pundit Laurence O'Donnell:

GREGORY: Yes. Lawrence, let me show you another number here, which pertains to the debates in particular. Which ticket is doing better in these debates, Obama/Biden 50 percent, McCain/Palin 29 percent. What surprises me about that is that I think both of these debates have highlighted pretty strong performances by both McCain and Palin. You can argue who won on points, certainly. But in both of those debates, they were strong performances. This polling doesn't bear that out at all.

Luckily, O'Donnell was able to talk Gregory down by injecting some needed reality:

There's no polling that bears that out, David. The polling we had that night from CBS and from CNN all indicated that Biden had a very big win, like giant margins over Sarah Palin, and that Obama, to all of our surprise, had a very significant win over McCain on the foreign policy debate, which was supposed to be the McCain winning debate issue.