Press expert Walter Shorenstein says he agrees that the coverage has been biased against Hillary (though he is a Clinton supporter).

Fancy that.

And the whole crying now before every primary? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Absurd and totally unfair. She only did that before two primaries.

The Rich column was about McCain Greg

Greg's right about one thing.

He's obsessing about Rich and Dowd

What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.

A few more “macaca” moments for the nearly all-white G.O.P. could spell its doom. Recognizing the backlash that has followed the racially tinged smears leveled at Mr. Obama so far, Mr. McCain wasted no time in publicly scolding the right-wing radio talk-show host who railed against Barack Hussein Obama at one of his rallies last week. Or perhaps, as those of us who like Mr. McCain want to believe, he is simply a man of honor: he knows that history will judge him exactingly on how he runs against America’s first black or female presidential nominee, win or lose.

Ah Halperin, the guy who called Obama a "pussy" and suggested McCain use racist/xenophobic smears to knock him out of the race. Yes, he's an excellent source of sober-minded analysis.

Slow news day Greg?
First, Rich and Dowd are opinion columnists, not news reporters, so the claim of bias is just whining.

Second, a Clinton supporter thinks the coverage has been biased. Wow, that is real news! But serioulsy, I wonder if he would think otherwise if she had won anything recently?

Third, the 3AM call continues to rule the news cycle for the third day. Must be more evidence of that Obama bias, you know, the media pushing Hillary's argument for her is really just what he wants.

Finally, Michele's brother makes fun of Hillary? Not very funny, but maybe he should try out for SNL.

Yes, the coverage of Clinton has been significantly more negative than the coverage of Obama. She hasn't helped herself by losing 10 straight contests, either, and by blow-out margins.

On the other hand, Clinton has a great deal of influence over the media, but her campaign isn't complaining about that. Edwards complained about the lack of coverage of his campaign, but that didn't launch a national discussion about the perceived unfairness of the media.

I'm tired of the "the press is being unfair to me" theme from Clinton. If she is the nominee, what she's facing now is nothing compared to what she'll face against St. McCain. And isn't it her campaign that's always pointing out that what Obama is facing now is nothing compared to what he might face in the general election?

Furthermore, if she is the nominee, how is she going to address the disparity in coverage after complaining about it now? Any protest from the Clinton campaign about coverage will be treated as fairly as the "she cried!!" episode. In other words, not at all. If her campaign had kept quiet now, and just fought on, a complaint of media bias would have packed a much bigger wallop later on. It won't. Another screwup by the Clinton campaign.

The bias exists. It's pernicious. It's due, in part, to the fact that it's Hillary Clinton running, and, to the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman. Trotting out "the media is so unfair!" theme now means that it's not going to be effective, at all, later on, when it might have had a real impact. Good on you, Hillary, Penn, and Wolfson.

She's no Molly Ivins, but MoDo sure does Billary nicely!

Only she has the wise head to go nuclear, should that Strangelovian phone call from a power-mad Putin come into the White House at 3 a.m. Her ad shows how composed she would be at the dread moment when she picks up the phone. Her nuke look is feminine, in a tailored camel-colored jacket and gold necklace, yet serious, in Tina Fey black reading glasses.

It’s hard to discern the message of the ad. The scariest thing is not the persistently ringing phone but an Andrea Yates-looking mother who’s creeping up on the sleeping babes in the dark. The point can’t be that Hillary is superior to Obama in international crisis management, because she’s done no more of it than he has. She’s only done domestic crisis management, cleaning up after Frisky Bill.

Is the message that Hillary is Ready on Night One?

So does Ron Fournier

CLEVELAND - Poor Hillary.

After trying to save her sinking candidacy with awkward turns of flattery and sarcasm, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton resorted to a new tactic in Tuesday night's debate: self-pity.

and where's your report from the "anti-Obama press bias"? You could start with Ignatius & any Krugman column, but do your own research.

But why not include blog bias against Obama & ask Ben Smith why he chose to highlight a controversial comment by Obama's brother-in-law out of a rather large New Yorker article? Or better yet, why did you chose to repeat it here? Is it just to stir up more Michelle Obama hatred? Oh and by the way, how's Hillary's brother-in-law doing these day & how about those Rodham brothers? Any news there?

Greg,

You state that "press expert Walter Shorenstein" agress that coverage has been biased against Hillary.

Could you explain what qualifies Walter Shorenstein as an expert on the press?

My understanding is that he is a rich, San Fransisco real estate developer, Demcratic fundraiser and long-time Clinton supporter. He did give money to establish the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University in memory of his daughter, who was a journalist. Does that make him an expert on the press?

Is your contention that Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy has made a judgment and statement that the press is showing bias against Hillary Clinton?

Sodden thought...what will I do once Mrs Bill is officially DOA, and I don't have Greg Sargent to kick around any more?

Over on his Horse's Mouth(Should be Horse's Arse) Greg Sargent wrote the following:

"Poll: Nearly Half Of Dems Say Media Is Harder On Hillary
March 1, 2008 -- 11:10 AM EST // //
Updated below.

Well, it looks like we've found yet another topic on which many average voters are way ahead of the pundits: The question of whether the media is harder on Hillary than on other candidates.

As regular readers know, this blog is sympathetic to the claim that in the broadest possible sense, much media coverage and punditry is unfair to Hillary on a very fundamental level and is tougher on her than on her rivals. This claim was advanced recently by the Hillary campaign itself -- a fact that doesn't necessarily render the claim false,"

Catch the headline he used to spin it: "Poll: Nearly Half Of Dems Say Media Is Harder On Hillary"

Shouldn't the headline actually be: More that half Of Dems say that Hillary is desperately in need of a Mega Enema!

the biggest joke in "journalism" that i've seen in awhile is that Ignatius column today. he's expressly, and totally dishonestly (ignoring readily available countervailing evidence), attacking the leading Democratic candidate. i myself could point out at least a half-dozen instances that directly rebut his central argument in the piece (and after Obama's press team's intervention, he even appears to concede at the end!), but evidently because this pathetic excuse for "journalism" is directed at Obama, Greg doesn't feel it merits a posting on his blog.

maybe Greg would like to point out to us where in the Rich or Dowd columns was such fallacious reasoning or factual inaccuracy presented?

Hmmm, so its a terrible and boring for Dowd and Rich to opine in an anti-Hillary fashion, but all of Krugman's anti-Obama screeds are, ummm, what? Okay because Krugman is a secular saint of the left while Dowd and Rich are well known meanies? Of no account whatsoever because they don't fit in with Greg's thesis?

Look, I'm simply not buying it. Matthews, Dowd and Rich don't like her. BFD. They're opinion journalists. They're allowed to be biased. It's their job. What's more, it does not look like they've done Obama any favors by favoring him. There is absolutley no evidence, none, zero, zilch, nada, that anyone has moved from her to him because Rich and Dowd like him and trash her. However, there is plenty of empirical evidence, actual statistical data from the exit polls as well as abundent anecdotal evidence, indicating that Hillary's constant whining about press bias has mobilized her base--boomer aged old line feminists and single working class women--and has even moved some of them back from Obama to herself.

Meanwhile, the slightly more subtle but nonetheless obvious anti-Obama bias of Jake Tapper at ABC, Ben Smith at Politico -- people who hold themsevles out as more or less real reporters rather than opinionators and thus are capable of doing more damage--is ignored a) because Obama doesn't whine about it 24/7 like a four year old on a crowded airplane and b) because it doesn't fit into Greg's thesis.

She's clearly working the refs in exactly the same way the RNC did it throughout the 90s, but under the Reverse Clinton Rules that are mandatory in the left-of-Franco segment of the blogosphere, it is forbidden to even contemplate the possibility.

Come one. Assume the truth of the proposition. The MSM monolithically hates Hillary and it affects their reporting. How does it follow automatically that this is necessarily the result of the Clinton Rules reasserting themselves. It is not at least conceivable that maybe, just possibly, there is some actual valid reasons for feeling that way about her? It's not a hypothesis that should be rejected out of hand just because the 90s are within one's adult memories while other eras are just words in a history book.

The MSM also hated Nixon and it likewise affected their reporting. They didn't hate Nixon because of some inherent political or attitudinal bias. The old working class white guys who did the reporting in those days were not all leftwingers. They disliked Nixon because Nixon was a paranoid, self-pitying kneecapper who surrounded himself with obsequious toadies, yes men and dirty-tricks artists. They were around him day in and day out, saw how his character flaws manifested and rightly feared what would happen if he ever got his hands on a lot of power. Well, as it happened, Nixon used their dislike to fill his perpetual self-pity bath, made it one of his major selling points with his base (remind you of anyone?) and, unfortunately, it did not keep him from getting power. At least, not in 1968.

Christamighty, of course her coverage is turning negative. The facts have a negative bias for her lately. She's lost eleven straight races. She touted her inevitability yet has turned out to have run an incompetent no ground game and had no backup plan in case Super Tuesday did not go the way Penn told her it would. She canned her campaign manager after she found out she had wasted a huge amount of money for no return. Her chief advisors are publically insulting each other in on the record interviews. When they aren't planting knives in each other's backs, they are making ever-more outrageous, borderline insane, pronouncements in what appears to be a contest to see which one can insult the the intelligence of the most people on the conference call. She treated the journalists she travelled with with utter contempt when she was on top and then came crawling back to them with bagles and smalltalk when she started losing and is surprised and hurt that it isn't working. Are they supposed to ignore all of that and just copy and paste from Hillaryis44.org?

And despite all of the negative stories since Super Tuesday, I am compelled to point out, as so many have done here before to no avail, that she has lost eleven straight effing races and has virtually no chance of catching up to Obama in pledged delegates, yet she is still being treated as if she had a serious chance of winning this campaign. What other candidate in the history of political journalism in this country has ever received that kind of indulgence, that kind of out and out favoritism, from the MSM in this country? Hell, they even wrote off their beloved St. John McCain until he actually managed to make a real come back.

So come on. Tell me. Who else?

Really. Name one. Just one.

Waiting . . .

Still waiting . . .

(Crickets.)

Should Dowd and Rich silence themselves if they have serious problems with HRC's character or the way her campaign's been run or etc. or etc.? I'm not sure what alternative Halperin or the Time's editors or Greg Sargent would suggest.

Is Hillary going to tear up when the Red Phone rings at 3 am? Will the "Shame on You" Hillary answer? How about the "Celestial Choir" Hillary? Are tears how she is going to push through health care mandatest this time?

It is a valid criticism of someone who is essentially running on her ability to be presidential...

This is funny - Bill Clinton endorsed Obama in 2004:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-fkoctaB18

If the columnist are "anti-Clinton", then they must be on a "jihad", because, after all, everyone knows that Obama is a ..., well, everyone knows.

It's comments like that one from Obama's brother in law that are really turning off Clinton's supporters. They had better realize that getting a Democratic president and Congress is absolutely critical for this country at this time, and if Obama is the nominee, he will need all our votes, not just his current supporters to put away McCain. Insulting us now, is not the way to do that. I don't intend to spite myself and my country by staying home in November instead of backing Obama, but the attitude from his campaign and supporters is making it harder and harder every day. Show that you believe his rhetoric of a better way, and cut the insulting language out, now.

I haven't read all the comments here, so forgive me if I'm repeating something already said.

If, BIG IF Hillary is getting more negative press, maybe it's because she IS more negative.
The press is supposed to report the good, the bad, and the ugly.

If Hillary and her campaign have been bad and displayed their ugly, should the press say it's good?

This just boggles the mind.

Rich and Dowd's commentary balances out that one man jihadist Paul Krugman and his anti-obama screeds.

Yeah, MoDo is a bit off the deep end, but Frank Rich makes Mark Halperin look like a columnist at my seventh grade newspaper. And maybe we should interview Hillary's brother-in-law? I bet he'd have great things to say...

hmmm...

If a brother in law's comment is newsworthy, then its worth reminding the readers...

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0102/21/bn.02.html

just sayin...

Greg,

I was here at 1:23. Since then, many have (quite rightly so) posed questions for you.

It is now almost 6:30, are you answering soon?

Thanks

Yeah, well, Hillary's third cousin twice removed said Obama has halitosis.

Jeez-ass, can it get any more unimportant? I can't wait till this is all over and we can really unload on McCain. Without being blamed for Hillary-bashing.

GREG WITH TIME ON HIS HANDS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR HILLARY!!!

Greg and Josh,

1. the "poll" you have linked on your front page uses a sampling of 427 people...out of 24 million that have voted in democratic primary's....thus it's not a poll...a survery perhaps, but not a poll...it's sampling is insignificant thus negating it's ability to be used as factual data---though you have cited as factual polling data.

2. In the survey you cite, a majority of the sampled claim they dont pay A LOT of attention to the media and how the canidates are treated...further negating your link.

3. finally the sample is 52% female and 72% w/o college education or more therefore 2 variables show canidate leanings negating it's ability to be used scientifically for anything other than indication of canidate preference.

Either you hired the plagarist as your new editor or too much time is being spent polishing the polk,regardless I look forward to your return to fact based journalism rather than vile surrogate blather being passed off as polling info.

From one american to another,

Thomas Hussein Jefferson

How could we all have been so stupid? Hillary as the Democractic standard bearer was always a fatally flawed concept. For a while there, we were in danger of being swept away by the romance of the the idea of the first woman president.

Now that the aura of inevitability has been punctured, many of us are starting to see things more clearly. The historians will have a lot to work with. Here's an early report from the front.

The Hillary candidacy was and is fatally flawed because she is who she is - Hillary Clinton. She is a walking contradiction.

Early in her husband's term, she is handed the prime responsibility for managing the country's transition to universal healthcare. She botches it so badly that the cause is set back for at least a dozen years. Her failure is also seen as a contributing factor in the historic Democratic loss of control of the House and Senate.

She is "gifted" a Senate seat in 2000 with no legislative experience, no history of residency in the state and never having been a candidate for any elected office.

In the Senate, she is swept up by the jingoism of the drumbeats for war. When the policy is exposed as a fraud, she subsequently asks for a free pass because of the deception of the administration. Yet Russ Feingold and Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy and, yes, even Barack Obama somehow managed to read the tea leaves correctly.

She's running on Bill Clinton's record - claiming credit for all the good things in the '90s while running away from the negative ones. So she says that she was forced to publicly support NAFTA while privately harboring doubts. Huh? (Head spins) If you accept that premise, then she would have license to revisit every policy decision she ever supported and repudiate her original position. This ludicrous proposition would be all too much fodder for the GOP meatgrinder in the general.

She is running a close race with Obama, but she is clearly running second with an almost an vertically steep burden on March 4th just to draw even. So she blames the press for treating her as the underdog - which she now is.

Her manner and personal disposition bounces about like a pinball as she employs multiple and opposing personas to try to change the game. Pride, sarcasm, empathy, vulnerability, intimidation, ridicule, self-parody are but a few of the many faces of Hillary that we have seen in the past couple of weeks. And she accuses the press of giving her consistently stoic opponent a free ride.

She is running as a feminist as if her qualifications were won through a lifetime of dedicated effort landing at the top of the pile in a meritocracy. We all know the truth that she's Bill's wife - very smart, but nonetheless Bill's wife.

This list goes on and on and on. The Democratic party has (seemingly) dodged a major bullet with Hillary's failure to win the nomination.

Let's hope that the results on Tuesday are decisive and fatal for Hillary's pretensions to the Presidency. Let's hope that the Clinton's gracefully accept that they have been beaten by a better player. Let's hope that they just go away and let us get on with repairing our democracy.

Greg:

There is no "high road" claim that the Clinton campaign can make at the point. So yes, Greg, the tears have gotten a little suspect (and I am a woman who like most working women, do not have the "luxury" of crying in the workplace when things are not going well that day).

Also: some talking-head commented that the Clinton campaign was "masterful" at managing the press. So the media bias story was floated about the time that: (1) people rightfully would be expected to ponder the question of what a "win" would be for her on Tuesday; and (2) people rightfully so would begin to push the question of her lack of financial transparency (memories of the Clinton years). They effectively changed the "subject." It was really quite a sight to behold. All the navel-gazing about daring to report that one candidate had lost 10 primaries/caucuses and was still functioning as a real candidate (as opposed to the way Hucklebee, for example, is perceived and written about, and Edwards having to pull out after 3 or 4 losses. Please give me a break!!).

By the way: The huge headline about the NYTimes poll was one more example of this page deliberately using misleading headlines. The NYTimes "poll" had a remarkable N of 460 (or so) and over 50% of the poll did NOT think that the press was biased (and yes, that is how you report poll results with such a small N). Also: One might also ask who was more likely to respond to an online (right?) "poll" on the NYTimes caucus page (right?) which has functioned as a metro page reporting of the election ("hooray for the local candidate Hillary"). Even given the likely respondent to the poll, and the profoundly unscientific nature of the "poll," it is really remarkable that over 50% did not think Clinton received unfair treatment by the media.

Since we're doing a round-up, shouldn't this be on the list?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFREDHB-nQ

As far as she knows, Obama isn't a Muslim.

Did any of you see 60 Minutes tonight? I'm seeing explosions of outrage in e-mails and on Web sites about Sen. Clinton's apparent attempt to raise doubts about Sen. Obama's non-Muslim status. Or if, as her defenders claim, it was just a clumsy, ill-judged answer, it makes me wonder how this person was ever on an evident trajectory to become a world leader.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFREDHB-nQ

Dirk,

You just beat me to it. Man, I can't wait for Tuesday...

Some are saying that it was an awkward question. For anyone with a diplomatic bone in her body, it's a breeze:

Q. You don't believe Senator Obama is a Muslim?

A. Of course not.

That's all that was required. She was the one who extended it.

Another thing that bothers me: As we saw in the last two debates, she become nervous and unnatural just before she has to say her "set pieces" (e.g., Xerox, and SNL cushion). It's as thought she knows they are ill-advised. She seems to do the same thing here, which makes me think it was planned and she has qualms about it.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think a critical scrutiny of these things has by now become justified.

Okay, the real issue here is what a bloated bloviator Steve Kroft is. For GOD'S SAKES. Why are we still talking about this? Who does he think he is, Tim Russert?

Hillary Clinton has no class. I have gone from wanting my candidate to win because he is the best candidate to wanting to see Clinton go down in flames because she has no ethical scruples, NONE. I had thought that her demand to have Florida and Michigan delegates count was outrageous enough but this last statement about Obama's religion . . . it's beyond the pale. Get her the hell off the stage! Superdelegates, AWAKE!

>>>I'm tired of the "the press is being unfair to me" theme from Clinton. If she is the nominee, what she's facing now is nothing compared to what she'll face against St. McCain.

Don't know why I've been so dense, but this just now occurred to me: What in the world is Hillary going to do with her 'pity party' and 'I'm not getting a level playing field' routines if she does have to run against John McCain????

He won't have to say anything more than Obama has (which is nothing) but we will all KNOW .... that her miseries, real though they may be, just don't register when compared to what he has had to deal with. The minute she tries it, she'll be toast. But I don't know if she'll be able to keep from falling into that persona, because I think that may be very close to the genuine Hillary: strength, intelligence, but enormous self-pity.