Sam Donaldson

This does not surprise me at all.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

And yet the media have been wringing their hands over John McCain's whining about all the attention Barack Obama is getting.

Yes, John McCain's friend and campaign advisor Phil Gramm was right: This is a "nation of whiners" -- except the whiners are the McCain campaign and their supporters.

When John McCain draws 200,000 (voluntary) listeners -- that's three football stadiums' worth of people -- I would expect him to get some camera time.

But I would also like to see the news media wake up to how they've been giving John McCain a free pass on a number of issues. Where is the critical view of McCain's qualifications? Does flying in a plane and getting shot down really qualify him to be President? Or even give him the advantage on strategic foreign policy? When McCain claims "I know how to win wars," on what basis?

Instead, they keep giving him uncritical time while he slings some of the wildest charges, including the claim that Barack Obama is a traitor who would deliberately lose a war for political gain.

I guess it's to be expected, considering that -- as Sam Donaldson says -- journalists aren't interested in the truth.

[T]he reason political reporters are there is not to speak truth to power. Today's truth is tomorrow's falsity. But to make those who say we have the truth-- the politicians--explain it.

That isn't journalism, it's stenography. No wonder we ended up in Iraq. The media didn't have to check facts, they just had to make sure the microphone was on.

After spending nearly 25 minutes talking mostly issues with John McCain, George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, George Will and Sam Donaldson proclaimed themselves above criticism in pretty much ignoring issues when it comes to Democrats.

Watch them congratulate themselves on feeling generally superior to the Democratic presidential candidates. They're just "the messenger," don't you know?

Cokie was especially strange today, saying that Barack Obama was unappealing when he started challenging the inanity of the questions fired at him by Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson. In my mind, that's when Obama started to find his footing.

George Will was predictable, offering grade-school-level economic analysis in grand proclamations about how a capital gains tax affects the economy. (We'll just pretend that nothing else affects the economy. We'll just pretend that everything happens as a result of capital gains taxes. There's a bridge in New York you might be interested in buying, too, by the way.)

ABC obviously made a power-play investment in moving the show right off the Washington Mall. The best part of the show was at the end, when the camera pans off of George's relieved (or smug) smirk and shows glimpses of the old Smithsonian and the Capitol. But there's no denying that the Beltway news as we know it is in for a comeuppance.

That is, unless the corporate media kill net neutrality and make the Internet more like TV.