McCain, Obama, and media bias

The New York Times rejected an op-ed article by Republican John McCain, said Don Frederick in the Los Angeles Times’ Top of the Ticket blog, and asked for a rewrite focusing more on his plans for Iraq and less on a July 14 op-ed essay by Democrat Barack Obama. McCain and other Republicans are expressing outrage over the Times’ alleged media bias, but the GOP bigwigs must also be pleased to get “a fresh reason to flog a tried-and-true target for conservatives.”

Well, when a newspaper prints “one candidate’s asinine campaign speech masked as an op-ed" and rejects his opponent's rebuttal, said Mark Kilmer in the blog RedState, how is that not biased coverage? “Bias has both a B and an S,” and this is just another example of how the Times has long since shed its pretense of being balanced.

Everyone knows that “conservatives like to complain about media bias,” said Matthew Yglesias in his blog at TheAtlantic.com, but “it’s a bit rich to hear this kind of whining from John McCain, who likes to call the media ‘my base.’”

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Still, the “livid” Republicans have a point, said The Economist’s Democracy in America blog. Fairness dictates that the Times should allow “McCain a reply without an excess of editorial fussing over the shape of the candidate’s message.” That said, Obama’s piece was mainly about Obama’s strategy, while McCain’s “is primarily an attack on Obama.”

Whether or not “the dark hand of media bias” is at work in this case, said Blake Hounshell in Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, a new study shows that “Obama has gotten the lion’s share of media attention since the general election began.” But is McCain really “the victim of the liberal media? Or is Obama just more interesting and new than McCain?”