If Democrats are going to stem their losses, CBS's Jeff Greenfield opined [1] on Monday's Evening News, they need to "convince the voters that this election is a choice" and "Republicans are just too extreme." Greenfield's probably right about this strategy being Democrats' best hope - and his fellow reporters are already hard at work fulfilling their role in painting Republicans as "extreme."
On Monday's Good Morning America, Jonathan Karl characterized as astonishing [2] how "Alaska's Joe Miller talked about rolling back the power of the federal government further than Republicans have talked about for more than 70 years." Even more jaw-dropping to ABC: "Miller and other Tea Party candidates also favor eliminating the Department of Education." How is that more radical than Democrats' takeover of private-sector health care?
The next morning, NBC's Today dropped any pretense of neutrality [3], casting Republican gubernatorial nominee Carl Paladino as an "angry candidate" at the "heart of one of the nastiest races in New York history." Co-host Matt Lauer accused the Tea Party-backed Paladino of engaging in "nasty campaigning," then challenged: "How can you practice that gutter politics for a long period of time and then all of a sudden say, 'That's not me anymore?'"
But 24 hours later, Lauer showed no such contempt in an interview [4] with DNC Chairman Tim Kaine. "Even with a high turnout, Republicans hold a 13-point lead over Democrats," Lauer fretted, "so how do Democrats chip away at those numbers in the next four weeks?"
Even as journalists generously dispensed such in-kind contributions to liberals, on Tuesday's CBS Evening News Nancy Cordes saw a scandal [5] in how outside groups favoring Republicans are raising five times more than groups favoring Democrats. "Outside groups," a horrified Cordes asserted without offering any evidence, "are often even less constrained by facts than the candidates they support." The next morning on CBS's The Early Show, co-host Harry Smith rued [6] that this spending on behalf of Republicans "literally takes these elections out of the hands of the voters."
Talk about Bizarro World: It's a perpetually biased media that unfairly favors Democrats more than Republicans; whose facts can't be trusted; and who attempt to take elections "out of the hands of the voters." But journalists never see a scandal in their own bias. They just want to shut down everybody else.