Media for Obama

Have you seen the complaints of how unfairly the media treated McCain/Palin during the election and how slanted they were toward Obama? My thought on this is how could any reasonable person, not blinded by ideology, not be slanted toward Barack Obama and Joe Biden, or at least turned off by the ridiculous McCain/Palin show and their farcical charges against Obama ('pals around with terrorists', 'socialist', 'radical', 'alien').

First off, the McCain of the campaign was a different McCain from what we had seen for almost 30 years. The real McCain was hidden and invisible. He finally showed up in his concession speech, but then it was too late. And second, I'm sorry, Sarah Palin was a joke, a person totally and completely unprepared to be Vice-President. She was picked because, one, she was a woman and thought to be able to pull in some of the Clinton women, and, two, because she pleased and fired up the religious and cultural right of the Republican Party. Did anyone in the Republican Party think that maybe, just maybe, the vice-presidential nominee should have some pre-existing qualifications to be the most powerful person in the world?

Think now, back to the 1932 election of Hoover against Roosevelt. Would it really surprise anyone, let alone offend anyone, if the press intuitively slanted toward Roosevelt in that campaign? The members of the press aren't machines who can meticulously balance every thought they think and every article they write, they're human beings who actually think thoughts and have families for whom they're concerned. I personally don't want them to be automatons who are mechanically 'objective' and 'fair and balanced.'

I think the media did their job just right.

Update: Andrew Sullivan writes in a similar vein:

The press is not supposed to be relentlessly in the middle of whatever two political parties at any moment in time represent. It's also supposed to have its own understanding of reality. After the worst presidency since Buchanan, with a default Republican nominee who picked a deranged know-nothing fem-bot as veep, with two disastrous wars, the worst attack on the US homeland in history and an economic crisis of unparalleled proportions in the modern world, some reporters and journalists had a duty to subject the incumbent party to more skepticism than the challenger.

The McCain campaign was, historians will note, one of the worst in memory. It is not disgusting bias for the media to reflect that at the time.