The election: Is the media biased against Romney?

If Mitt Romney loses the presidential election, said Mona Charen in NationalReview.com, it won’t be hard to figure out why. The Republican presidential nominee has faced “perhaps the most corrupt and tendentious coverage in presidential history,” with the mainstream media doing everything in its power to ensure that its darling, Barack Obama, is re-elected. Every “gaffe” Romney has made has been blown out of proportion, while Obama’s many mistakes, horrible economic record, and mishandling of the attacks on Americans in Libya have been all but ignored by the “supine” press. As Paul Ryan, the vice presidential candidate, put it this week, “Most people in the mainstream media are left of center and therefore, they want a very left-of-center president.” If you get your information from newspapers and TV networks, said Jay Nordlinger, also in NationalReview.com, “you would never know Romney is an impressive man”—successful in almost everything he’s ever done, bright, warm, and decent. Instead, “you would think he was a moron and a jerk.”

You’ve uncovered our grand plot! said David Carr in The New York Times. Each week, we in the mainstream media gather together in “dark chambers” to discuss how best to put our “collective liberal thumb on the scale” for President Obama. In the real world, such conspiracy theories make less sense than ever: Only 33 percent of people get their news solely from traditional sources such as TV, public radio, and newspapers. So how can anyone claim there’s a “mainstream” media at all? Across the new media landscape, there’s a “growing hegemony of conservative voices”: Rush Limbaugh and a host of imitators dominate talk radio, Fox News is king of the cable news ratings, and the largest-circulation newspaper in the U.S. is that “bastion of conservative values,” The Wall Street Journal. Online, there are hundreds of conservative blogs and websites. A more credible explanation for Romney’s troubles so far is the obvious one: He’s run a lousy campaign, full of pratfalls.

It’s undeniably true that the Romney campaign “is run very badly indeed,” said Tim Stanley in Telegraph.co.uk. But the media nonetheless overemphasizes and constantly repeats his mistakes, while giving Obama a pass on his. Why? Not because reporters are left-wing radicals who “only break away from their copies of Das Kapital to type up White House press releases.” It’s because the media has been seduced by Barack Obama’s historic narrative, as the first black president, who rose from nowhere to take the White House in 2008. A defeat four years later would ruin that lovely story. Nowhere is this bias more apparent than in the media’s fixation on polls, said Robert Stacy McCain in The American Spectator. This year, a preponderance of polls give Obama a sizable lead, due to an unreliable “skew in party identification toward Democrats.” Every day, the media trumpets that Obama has a virtually insurmountable lead, demoralizing Republicans and convincing swing voters that the election is already decided. The poll coverage becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy”—creating a victory for Obama.

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Even though “I loathe Mitt Romney,” said John Cook in Gawker.com, I have to admit that conservatives have a point. The press has decided that Romney is a loser, “a hapless, robotic buffoon”—and it filters every story through that perception. The media did the same thing to John Kerry in 2004, portraying him as a “windsurfing, pussy-whipped flip-flopper,” and to Al Gore in 2000, who was depicted as a “sighing, disingenuous wannabe alpha male.” Unfortunately, this is how the political press covers elections—as personality contests. Romney fell right into this trap by running such a cautious, “uncreative” campaign, said Ross Douthat in NYTimes.com. It was his job as the Republican candidate to shape the narrative, and focus attention on Obama’s record. He failed, and when his secretly videotaped dismissal of “47 percent” of Americans emerged, Romney may have sealed his own fate.

So even if the media is rooting against him, said Jason L. Riley in The Wall Street Journal, Romney and his surrogates should think twice about whining about media bias. If that worked, “Newt Gingrich would be the nominee.” The press was no less hostile toward George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, and both Republicans managed “not only to win the presidency, but get re-elected.” Romney is running against an incumbent with an 8.1 percent unemployment rate. If he loses, he has only one person to blame.