digby (1/19/10) spotted a telling moment on the Ed Show (MSNBC, 1/19/10), when host Ed Schultz asked Politico's Mike Allen "what's the next move for progressives" if the Democrat lost in the Massachusetts Senate race. Allen's response:

I would remind you that when Republicans started to eat each other up, we talked about how it wasn‘t very smart.  I think a lot of people will make that point about Democrats as well.

digby's rejoinder:

OK. Eight or nine months ago, the villagers were all saying that the Republicans were eating at each other and that it wasn't very smart. And the Republicans told them to go to hell, Fox News started the tea party movement and the right-wing media in general launched what seemed like a lunatic campaign to demonize Barack Obama as a socialist. All that seems to be working pretty well for them at the moment, so Allen's admonishment doesn't make a lot of sense.

In fact, the only lesson to be learned is to not listen to anything the village media say. Ever. The Republicans learned that a long time ago. The Democrats need to learn it too.

Somehow the Drudge-friendly news site Politico managed to write an entire piece today about pressure on the White House from anti-war left ("W.H. Fears Liberal War Pressure") without actually quoting anyone who might apply that pressure. Reporter Mike Allen did gather thoughts from Matt Bennett of the Third Way think tank (a self-consciously centrist group incoherently labeled  the "moderate voice of the progressive movement"), White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell and several anonymous White House officials. Bennett commented that Obama's supporters "are fighting a really serious political battle to keep the criticism under control." They probably don't need to work that hard at it--not with the help they're getting from establishment media outlets like Politico.

Politico's Mike Allen writes (5/27/09)

The media's left-of-center bias is rarely more apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick was slanted heavily toward the notion of how "pragmatic" Obama's legal views are and how unlikely he was to pick a liberal.

So coverage of Supreme Court fights is one of the best illustrations of corporate media's supposed lean to the left? Only three of the current justices had what could be described as a "fight" over their confirmation: Clarence Thomas (confirmed by a vote of 52-48), John Roberts (78-22) and Samuel Alito (58-42); all the others were confirmed with less than 10 percent of the Senate voting against them.

Despite the allegations of sexual harassment that were leveled against Thomas during his confirmation hearings, media coverage at the time depicted him as highly credible in his denials (Extra!, Special Issue 1992), and generally treated the question of whom to believe as impossible to answer.

Roberts got intensely favorable coverage from corporate media, to the point where Newsweek was denouncing as "conspiracy theories"  accurate characterizations of Roberts' record (FAIR Action Alert, 8/2/05). When the pro-choice group NARAL pointed out that Roberts had filed a brief in support of an abortion clinic blockader who had previously been convicted of bombing, this was widely denounced in the media as out of bounds (Extra!, 11-12/05); can anyone seriously imagine establishment pundits chiding right-wing activists for bringing up legal work Sonia Sotomayor had done on behalf of bombmakers?

With Alito as well, corporate media tended to treat his unflappable demeanor as more important than his legal views, giving him generally high marks for his confirmation performance (CounterSpin, 1/20/06).

The only Supreme Court nominee to be voted down by the Senate in modern times was Robert Bork. That was in 1987, when FAIR was just getting started, so we don't have any contemporaneous analysis of the coverage of that fight--but corporate media have subsequently created an entirely inaccurate mythology about Bork's unfair treatment (FAIR Media Advisory, 7/21/05; Extra! Update, 4/99).

Allen says that it's during such episodes that corporate media's left-leaning bias is most apparent. What's actually apparent is that charges of left-wing media bias never need to be accompanied by actual evidence.

A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (4/18/09) samples the response to Mike Allen of Politico's quote of "a former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush" calling the publishing of U.S. torture memos "damaging because these are techniques that work":

This, from Andrew Sullivan, is a representative example of the reaction:

Allen is allowing a member of the administration that broke the Geneva Conventions and committed war crimes to attack the current president and claim, without any substantiation, that the torture worked. He then allows that "top official" to proclaim things that are at the very least highly questionable. What journalistic standard is Allen following in allowing such a person to speak anonymously?

But things get really interesting when, in Allen's "attempt to explain his behavior," he wound up "revealing the devouring black hole of corruption at the heart of Washington 'journalism'":

While I was writing the piece, a very well-known former Bush administration official e-mailed some caustic criticism of Obama’s decision to release the memos. I asked the former official to be quoted by name, but this person refused, e-mailing: "Please use only on background." I wasn’t surprised....

I figured that readers could decide whether the former Bush official’s comments sounded defensive or vindictive. And Politico readers aren’t so delicate that we have to deceptively pretend there's no other side to a major issue.

Schwarz explains that what Allen is "accidentally telling us here" is "that the Bush official initiated the contact, and without Allen agreeing to any conditions. In other words--even if Allen believes there's some value to printing unsubstantiated, blatantly self-serving assertions--he had absolutely no obligation to ask permission to quote the official, by name or otherwise. But since he's a well-trained little lad, he did anyway."