A trainwreck in slow motion, on an endless tape loop

That's what we're being forced to endure, courtesy of our corporate media. Coverage of this presidential campaign has been and, barring some catastrophic misstep, will continue to be slanted egregiously in favor of John McCain. The media narrative is set, and no one will be permitted to stray outside of its narrow confines lest Saint John stop having his journalist pals over for free ribs and beer. What's worse, these clowns aren't even trying to hide their bias any more. It has now become completely acceptable - no, fashionable - to be in the tank for one candidate and to allow your attachment to that candidate to skew your reporting, provided that that candidate is John McCain. After all, isn't he a steely-eyed missile man like Dubya? And, like Bush, isn't he Very Serious, so Serious that (as I have said before and will keep repeating ad nauseum as long as there's a chance, however slim, that by repetition reality will finally sink in) he's willing to attack Iran while at the same time Keeping Us Strong in the Global War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan? (Plus I bet he could muck out the Augean Stables at the same time, with one hand tied behind his back.)

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

But Todd's admission that journalists protect McCain because they're convinced he's a true expert in national security is nonetheless extraordinary because it is clearly what journalists -- by their own admission -- are doing. It echoes exactly what The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus said last week:

I thought that was an odd comment from Sen. McCain, and I do think that it would have gotten a lot more attention were it not coming from someone who is generally judged to have a lot of foreign policy expertise . . . . Probably won't break through the chatter, and I agree, would be a bigger deal if the speaker had been different. [This, btw, is almost a textbook definition of a double standard.]

And numerous other journalists last week acknowledged much the same thing, dismissing the importance of the story on the ground that this is John McCain we're talking about, so it just can't be that he was ignorant about the Middle East or being deceitful, no matter how clearly the facts proved that he was. Many of them, like both Russert and Todd here, went out of their way to describe falsely what McCain did, to make it seem as though it was a one-time "stumble" (Russert) or just McCain "misspeaking" (Todd -- though to Todd's credit, he pointed out that McCain had been using this false claim repeatedly as a "talking point").

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