Democrats gave his Republicans a trouncing on Election Day
I don't have an issue with that. The GOP lost 29 seats. They didn't pick up any Dem seats in the House, Senate or governor seats. That's a trouncing.
I agree on the Cheney thing. Although he is glum 99% of the time. But if a person openly appears angry or confused or thrilled, you can't avoid all adjectives.
And "lame-duck session" is a pretty common term for "last 2 years of a president's term," so that's neither here nor there.
On an overall, though, Clary, I think you're incorrect. Most articles like this try to be straight-forward as possible. And one area where the right overreaches is to claim media bias in every last article that may have a criticism or state unpleasant facts about someone. It's one thing to claim bias on that CBS "Bush skipped out of the Guard" report (although faulty reporting and clinging too tightly to the thesis was more the issue there), but to dissect AP articles for subtle signs of bias? I don't see it. Occam's Razor, man. If you have to pick bias or sloppiness, generally you have to go with the latter.
The TV networks are more guilty of bias, depending on the theme that's running at the time. The "Democrats are weak" theme ran on and on for a long time without any real counterpoint; some of the networks have far more right-wing talking heads on than left-wing talking heads. On the other hand, I'd argue that the Virginia senate race probably stuck with the Macaca-racist-noose-in-his-office thing for quite a bit too long, and once that ball gets rolling, it's hard to turn it around, and the media just piles on.
I'm more disturbed by the media's penchant for playing up the horse-race aspects of every issue and playing every issue like it's political inside baseball.
"How will this play with soccer moms?" is like 55% of all the stories. Never mind that -- "how it will play" will be answered when the voters vote.
Dear fluffy-haired anchor: You tell me the issue. I will respond to it in my way.
Or the articles that do the "How will the Iraq deaths affect Karl Rove?" Who gives a rat's *** how it affects Karl Rove? What about how it's affecting Iraq? America?
We need reporters to discern betwen one side and another, and to call bulls*** on things when they're out-and-out untruths, and lots of politicians mouth those things all the time. But for some reason now, maybe because of fear of being called biased, reporters don't come out and say, "Well, essentially you're full of crap." It's not a crime to do this. When a Rove type says "Democrats want to give terrorists flowers," and no Dem has ever said such a thing, it's fine for a reporter to write, "Mr. Rove, however, could not name any specific such incident in which a Democrat said this." You could say the same with Howard Dean and his comments on the emminent domain thing (robieae if you're there, see? I'm quoting you!) when he said "Bush wants to take your house away," and then point out, "But the people who voted for the decision were the traditionally more left-leaning members of the court."
The media's obligation beyond that, really, remains to document as much as possible, use anonymous sources judiciously but not shy away from it when it's needed, give both sides a chance to respond to charges and accusations, and put it as straight-forward as possible. But everything is all about the horse-race stuff, and it's annoying. TV really doesn't help this, and the shrill blowhards make it all the more worse.
