My argument isn’t really that he hasn’t had to answer tough questions. What I believe is, for the crucial period in which this nomination was decided — January to mid-February — he received extremely favorable and over the top treatment. Again, we will see what the rest of the year brings.

Far more interesting to me is the other issue you raise, which I think transcends this election and these candidates, and that is the nature of media. Have you read Eric Alterman’s New Yorker column about newspapers from March? The article recounts an interesting history about the relationship between the public and the press — won’t bore you here, because I bet you’re up on it, but he talks of the early days of media theory — recounting the theories of Walter Lippman and John Dewey. Lippman, as I am sure you know, favored a model for journalism that was closer to today’s — dispassionate reporting…telling the score of the game but not so much how it was achieved. Dewey (again as I am sure you realize) saw journalism as a way of seeding and continuing a conversation, where a multiplicity of opinions was a desired, not feared outcome.

Intriguingly enough, with the web, we are moving toward a Dewey model. Our exchange is evidence enough!

I have to retract an earlier comment. If you were truly like the right wing commentators of this world, you clearly would have cut off this conversation about 4 or 5 dispatches ago.

Though we still disagree, I feel better and will stop belaboring this point. Carry on, sir.

And contrary to your comments in #11, my “thesis” has nothing to do with partisanship. My thesis is that in an election when the stakes are so incredibly high, that will shape our country for the next generation, this type of fawning from the media is simply embarrassing.

Given that media coverage doesn’t exist in a vacuum, I don’t disagree that the tenor has changed in recent weeks. And we will see what the general election brings — I certainly expect the heat to rise.

Let me just end with a question: Based on what you’ve said here, then, you obviously had no problem with the fawning “Straight Talk Express” of McCain in his 2000 campaign. Right?

(P.S. - just as embarrassing.)

Currently, however, I think you are in wholesale and very deep denial if you cannot see bias in having journalists say they are “swooning” and comment that they find it “hard to remain objective” and that they get a “thrill up their leg” when the candidate speaks. Is it REALLY your argument that we should assume that journalists with these attitudes are truly serving the public in a dispassionate manner?

All I read in your responses WRT to Barack Obama is pure, unadulterated blind partisanship — no different, really, from the right wing commentators you so often disdain.

Sorry, that’s just the way I see it.

1) Arent’t their statements (made in print and on the air) examples of media bias on their face? Do you hear journalists talking openly about going into “detox” over McCain or having a hard time remaining objective about Clinton? and

2) Even if you discount those plainly over-the-top comments as “unbiased” (yikes if you do), how can you not wonder about the mindset of the reporters … i.e., what those viewpoints do to affect their perspective in allocating newshole and broadcast time, in choosing angles and images, in what to write, what to say and how to say it? To me, ANY editor with any brains would take Cowan and whichever journalists are in Obama detox and send them to cover HS sports. They don’t belong anywhere near the most important election in a generation.