Halperin at Politico/USC conf.: 'extreme pro-Obama' press bias - Alexander Burns - Politico.com: "Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

'It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,' Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. 'It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.'"
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Yes, it was all of that and more. I think Halperin was comparing coverage of Obama to the coverage of the first Gulf War, which was also incredibly superficial and one-sided. The press did a whole lot of self-examination after that and took steps to avoid being manipulated by the government again. But here they did something different. It wasn't that they allowed themselves to be manipulated by a powerful government that had control of all the information. Here they did it all by themselves. It was a blatant double standard--refusing to examine Obama and Biden the way they have always examined other candidates. They were scrutinizing Biden himself until he became Obama's VP candidate, at which time the Media Cone of Silence descended over him as well.

This is a questionable approach on several grounds, including their own self-interest. If you look at the way newspaper readership has plummeted, you see an industry that was in free-fall even before the housing market tanked. People have more choices now, so I would think the national media would try to broaden their appeal instead of alienating almost half the population.