by Donald Finley

Created on: June 06, 2008   Last Updated: September 09, 2011

Media bias is pervasive all across the political spectrum, but the majority of the bias leans to the left. Just look at the home page of the Media Research Center (www.mrc.org) and you can see the leanings quite clearly. Headline after headline as I write this show unequivocally who the media's favorite presidential candidate will be. Barack Obama won a "magic moment", his speech was "triumphant", he has "made history", he is "something special". It is so rampant that it even has a name, "Obama-mania".

Compare these to recent headlines about John McCain: "McCain Psychologically Damaged? Suffer Dementia? Die Soon?" or "Substance Abuse? People Think McCain War Injuries 'Funny'?" Anyone who follows politics at all knows that Senator McCain spent years as a POW in Vietnam. When he recently released his medical records, CNN's medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, speaking as a CBS news contributor, said he was more concerned about what he didn't see in the medical history - a mention of mental health - than what he did see. He very slyly introduced a non-existent topic as a campaign issue. In essence, he made something up and reported it.

In 2005, a UCLA political scientist led a study that found media bias to be very real. He researched back 10 years and found that of 20 major media outlets, 18 leaned left and only one leaned right, with only one close to center. Bernard Goldberg, a long time CBS correspondent, wrote an OpEd about media bias in 1996, then published "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" in 2002. It was his account of that bias and how he was blacklisted as a result of his comments. His primary message was that the bias was so ingrained and institutional that most of the media don't even realize how biased they are.

The entrenched bias appeared to be the problem with what may well be the most egregious case of media bias in U.S. history. In the months approaching the 2004 presidential election, then CBS anchorman Dan Rather, a broadcast legend, ran a story about George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard. The story was very critical of Bush, and included a document allegedly written by Bush's former commander. Scott Johnson from www.littlegreenfootballs.com analyzed the document and conclusively proved the document to be fabricated. The font spacing present in the memo was not possible with the best of typewriter technology at the time. When he recreated the memo using Microsoft Word, the original, allegedly written

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