I couldn't help but noticing the opposite approaches adopted by progressive magazine "The Nation", which last week began circulating an open letter urging Barack Obama to stand firm on his progressive positions taken during the primaries, and this site, which praised Obama for what independent website Politifact.com called a "full flop" on tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, much of which is located in Alaska.

Today, MYDD praises the right-wing Alaska Governor for being happy about Obama's flip flop.

I think both approaches make sense: One one hand, we have The Nation, asking Obama not to treat us voters like tools by dishonestly shifting his position on the issues according to what polls dictate.

A story not reported here yet is the one by McClatchy Newspapers revealing that the birth certificate belonging to Rielle Hunter's son, who has been said to be John Edwards' and Hunter's love child, lists no one as the child's father.

Slate Magazine's Mickey Kaus  complained today that the media is seeking to protect Elizabeth Edwards--who has cancer--from the devastating news that would be the confirmation of the National Enquirer story, in which the magazine claimed to have caught John Edwards in a Beverly Hills hotel with Hunter.

A security guard on duty at the time of the alleged story confirmed having protected a scared Edwards from curious reporters.

What do you guys think? Should the major media outlets pursue an investigation of the matter?

We shouldn't pay attention to national polls as much as individual state polls, we are told. But the problem with electoral college maps is that the most recent polls used to represent each state have been conducted before the most relevant breaking news that as we all know, can change the electoral snapshot in a matter of days.

How many state polls have you seen, for instance, since Obama began his overseas trip? How many state polls have been conducted completely after the McCain's "celeb" and "The One" ad aired? Is the number close to 50 states? Half? A quarter of states? Who knows what the situation is in Ohio as I type this, even considering the latest Quinnipiac poll there?

No one knows.

Yet every day we are presented with Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls that gives us an almost real-life snapshot of our political reality. Similarly, Zogby came up with a new national poll today.

Therefore, assigning this or that state a "toss-up" or "strong D" or "strong R" is very misleading.

TPM founder Joshuah Micah Marshall said yesterday that the new McCain ad--comparing Obama to celebrities Britnay Spears and Paris Hilton-- sought to imply that Obama has a "taste for young white women."

Of course, Marshall did not provide any reasoning whatsoever to explain how he came to that conclusion, or where in the ad the possibility of Obama being attracted to white women is even hinted. Go ahead, readers. See the ad and be your own judge.

Inventing this kind of BS worked against Hillary Clinton, because virtually everyone in the media, left, center and right, hated her, and refused to ask the likes of Marshall to lay out the premises behind their arguments.

But these are not the primaries. The corporate media no longer feels compelled to play dumb, since Marshall's target is their beloved John McCain, not Clinton.

Washington Post's media critic Howard Kurtz, for instance, found Marshall's remarks puzzling:

But isn't the McCain camp mockingly comparing Obama to the likes of Britney Spears, rather than implying that he likes to hang with starlets?

Again, Marshall should start making sense, since his comments will be scrutinized this time around. McCain is not a Clinton.

Writing for Time's Swampland blog, Ana Marie Cox observes that the scant available data from the new CMPA study on evening news bias in the networks' evening news shows, the most significant finding is the lack of bias existent in said networks.

COX (7/28/08): The authors [of the study] admit that "most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative," and that, in fact, found "less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combinedf." (I actually think that this apparent LACK of bias should be the real headline of the study.) Let's be generous and say that the average was about 1.5 "opinionated" statements a night--that's a grand total of about 60 "biased" statements since the study began on June 8.

Similarly, progressive media critic Bob Somerby today notes:

Simply put, CMPA's studies are rarely worth the pixels they burn. (Neither are similar studies from other orgs.) The notion that CMPA can quantify "positive/negative" coverage usually turns out rather poorly. On what basis does CMPA decide that some statement is "positive" or "negative?"Often, organizations which offer such studies have arcane notions of what those terms mean. When they give examples, we sometimes learn that their idea of a "negative" comment doesn't track our own real closely. And sometimes, these orgs give no examples at all. We are left with no real idea of what they're talking about.

Somerby also points out that some people are equating "network evening news shows" with "the media", when in fact only evening news shows were examiined. Click on the links above for more on the issue.

There is not one discussion on media bias in which someone on our side won't quip, "Oh yeah? If the media is anti-McCain, why does he call it "my base"?

Two things must be investigated:

  1. Did McCain really call the media "my base"?, and if so,

  2. When?

We are in campaign 2008. If McCain called the media his base in 2000, I don't think that argument has any bearing on discussion of current media bias.

A baseball player is not necessarily great now because he was great in 2000.
Jack doesn't necessarily like Jill now because he liked her in 2000.

One commenter speculated that John McCain was using the strategy Clinton allegedly used, that is, working the refs in order to gain sympathy. Besides the fact that Clinton did not put a gun to SNL's staff's heads to mock pro-Obama/anti-Clinton coverage, I have this to say:

First of all, Barack Obama received immensely better coverage than Hillary Clinton, just as he is receiving immensely better coverage than John McCain this time around.

Second, John McCain declined to comment when asked whether he thought the media was going a bit too far in its coverage of Barack Obama's trip.

If you want to continue the primary fighting-mode, bring it on. I will gladly debunk your BS, my cultist friends. If you act as if the primaries are over and stop picking on Hillary, I will give you a pass on your fabrications against McCain. In the meantime, allow me to debunk your falsehood:

Howard Kurtz, AP's TV critic David Brauder, and the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, among others, and not John McCain, have been complaining about the fawning coverage received by Obama in recent weeks:

See "Kurtz: Media "Covering Obama As If He Were Already President" (July 21, 2008):
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/poli tics/kurtz_media_covering_obama_as_if_he _were_already_president_89744.asp?c=rss

See, "Is media playing fair in campaign coverage?" (July 20, 2008), where Bauer observes:

The news media have devoted significantly more attention to the Democrat since Hillary Rodham Clinton suspended her campaign and left a two-person contest for the presidency between Obama and Republican John McCain, according to research conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080720/ap_e n_tv/ap_on_tv_obama_s_trip

See Tom Rosenstiel, director of the independent Project for Excellence in Journalism, saying,

"No matter how understandable it is given the newness of the candidate and the historical nature of Obama's candidacy, in the end it's probably not fair to McCain,"

.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080720/ap_e n_tv/ap_on_tv_obama_s_trip

The economy is the top issue in Americans' minds right now, and the #1 factor in deciding for whom to vote in November.

Cruel as it may sound, Obama would benefit greatly if gas prices continue to climb to the point that Americans cannot afford it. Unfortunately, said prices have tubled $16 the past week.

As we all know, Americans associate McCain with George W. Bush. The former voted with the latter approximately 90% of the time last year, if I'm not mistaken. Americans also have the false impression that the president of the United States has control over the price of crude, when in fact, this is barely true.

And if oil prices deline, the American voter will believe Bush, and by extension McCain, did it.