More Tilted Than Mrs. Edwards' Side Of The Car

Regardless of what happens in tomorrow's election, this year will be remembered as the nadir (and last gasp) of the so-called mainstream media. Never has the media worked harder to get one candidate elected.

Evan Thomas of Newsweek (who's no conservative; his grandfather was the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas) estimated that the severe media tilt would be worth as many as 15 polling points for Kerry/Edwards. They've worked hard to live up to Thomas' prediction.

Among the contributions of the mainstream media during this election year:

• The dropping of the Sandy Berger story. Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor was caught stealing classified documents relating to the Clinton Administration's handling of terrorism from the National Archives, and we haven't heard a peep about it since the day after it became public.

• The breathless run-up to the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, followed by a virtual media blackout after it turned out that the report was largely favorable to Bush.

• CBS News' still-unretracted false Alabama Guard Memos story, in which Dan Rather was clearly shown to have credulously relied upon blatantly forged documents to "prove" that President Bush did not live up to his Guard responsibilities. Not one word of the story has been documented to be true, and much of it has been proved false. But after a weeklong firestorm, the story died out while Dan Rather still sits as managing editor of CBS News.

• Not to be deterred by one major exposing of their partisan motives, CBS News also tried to hold onto the Iraq ammo dump story to run on last night's "60 Minutes," a mere 36 hours before the election. When the New York Times prepared to run the story (which it also had), a CBS producer begged them to hold it until just before the election. Even the ethically challenged Times was horrified. According to the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz, Times editor Bill Keller refused to hold the story until Sunday, saying that to do so "wouldn't give the White House a fair opportunity to respond." Which was clearly CBS's goal.

• Their complete ignoring of the Swift Boat Veterans, hundreds of whom served with John Kerry and vociferously oppose his candidacy. The only time the mainstream media ever referred to them was as a supposed example of how low the Bush campaign was willing to sink.

• Their relentless flogging of the Abu Graibe story, which, while abhorrent, is certainly no more egregious than the war crimes that John Kerry himself has admitted to.

• Etc. Etc. Etc., ad nauseum.

As Kurtz reveals in that right wing rag, the Washington Post (citing a study from the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism), anti-Bush media coverage dominated 59% of the time during the two weeks of the debates. Over 1/3 of the stories during that period were labeled as "clearly positive" towards John Kerry, as compared with 14% for Bush.

The media has worked its hardest as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. We'll see tomorrow how successful their fevered efforts have been.