Bias, the bulge, and more

Bush's best friend isn't his new dog. It's the "liberal" media.

The Rather document debacle gave Right-wing propagandists fuel for their claims that the mainstream media outlets are engaged in a massive conspiracy against conservatism. Right-wing pundits continue to call the documents computer-generated forgeries -- even though David Hailey, the only expert in questioned documents who has looked into the matter, has proven that these pages were not produced on a word processor.

If the media had a liberal bias, why wasn't Hailey's face beamed into living rooms across the country?

But that's not the only story the "liberal" media has repressed recently. One good example would be bulge-gate:

"The New York Times assigned three editors to this story and had it scheduled to run five days before the election, which would have raised questions about the president's integrity," said Lindorff. "But it was killed by top editors at the Times; clearly they were chickening out of taking this on before the election."

The NYT piece contained compelling and unrefuted scientific evidence disproving the official story (of that time) that the bulge resulted from bad tailoring. The article was typeset and ready to hit the presses five days before the election. Editor Bill Keller personally killed the story due to timing, not content -- an act which caused mutinous rumblings among writers for the Times.

Bob Woodward was interested in the story, but admitted that the Washington Post would not run the story before the election.

(Now that the official story has changed -- the bulge, we are told, is real; it is caused by the straps of a bullet-proof vest -- no-one in the media points out the flaws in this idea. The straps for bullet-proof vests are located on the sides. Why would Bush use such a vest when debating Kerry or meeting visitors at the White House, but not when reciting his stump speech before large crowds?)

The mainstream news outlets protected Bush. In the run-up to the election, the ugly pattern kept repeating itself.

CBS killed an important story about the faked Niger documents -- in fact, the network specifically promised not to run the piece until after the election.

CNN executives quashed a story on Bush's Saudi Arabian friends until after the election.

Few mainstream outlets reported on the G.O.P.'s flagrant voter suppression efforts.

When it came to stories that might have embarrassed Bush before the election, the "liberal" press went on a killing spree comparable to Ted Bundy's.