Was The Media Unfair To Hillary? Here's Our Rundown.

By Greg Sargent

Just what you all have been waiting for: Our long and detailed rundown on the coverage of Hillary during 2008.

This is being endlessly debated right now on television and elsewhere: Was the media biased in favor of Obama and against Hillary? But that's the wrong question, because it's a question about the motives of the press, rather than about the actual coverage.

What we should be asking is this: Was the media's coverage unfair in its treatment of Hillary? Was it more unfair to Hillary than to Obama?

The debate on this stuff has been downright surreal. On Friday, for instance, The New York Times ran a long piece interviewing members of the press on whether they had treated her fairly -- because we are the most objective judges of our own conduct, of course. You'll be surprised to hear that many of these media figures pronounced their own conduct impeccable.

Here's another way to approach this: Let's take a look at the coverage itself.

I've compiled a long list of episodes after the jump where media figures indulged in bogus, unfair, or outright misleading coverage of the New York Senator. While this puts me at risk of being declared the "worst person in the world" by Keith Olbermann, I submit that it's a useful exercise, on the theory that a debate about the coverage should include a discussion of the actual coverage.

Do my examples prove that the media was unfair to her as a whole or worse to her than to Obama? Not really. But taken together, they amount to a startling parade of media buffoonery and mendacity that should have been unacceptable to any reasonable observer -- even ones who supported one of her rivals.

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