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.

So here's our list.

On occasions too numerous to count, ridiculous non-stories first pushed by Drudge and other confidence men were actually deemed real news by major news orgs. Here are but three high-profile examples:

-- Following Drudge, multiple news orgs decided it was big news that Hillary had used an allegedly phony southern drawl during a speech. Making matters worse, reporters failed to tell viewers that Drudge had manufactured this story by posting video that ripped her words out of context in a comically dishonest way.

-- Following Drudge, multiple news orgs treated seriously a completely ridiculous story alleging that unnamed Hillary staffers had "circulated" a picture of Obama in a turban.

The only evidence that this ever happened was that confirmed-fact-inventor Drudge said it did -- and what's more, his story wasn't even specific in its allegations. It didn't say what level the staffers operated at and didn't even say what was meant by the meaningless charge that it had been "circulated." Nonetheless, reporters and pundits treated the story seriously, often without noting these obvious defects.

-- Following Drudge, news orgs actually decided that it was news that Hillary's non-use of her middle name showed she was having an "identity crisis."

More:

-- Reporters and pundits offered wall-to-wall coverage of the most trivial of emotions on Hillary's part -- her laugh, and her tears -- and repeatedly seized on such moments to assert that her emotions were entirely staged in order to manipulate voters into believing that Hillary is a human being.

There's no polite way to put this: The coverage of Hillary's "cackle" was simply sick to its core. Even Howard Kurtz acknowledged that reporters and analysts were lavishing attention to it because "examining her personality quirks is more fun than deconstructing her stance on Iraq."

Meanwhile, some of you will argue that coverage of her tears helped her in the run-up to New Hampshire. That's very possible. Nonetheless, it fed the "Hillary is a phony" narrative, and it just doesn't change the fact that the reporting and punditry on her laugh and her tears was over-the-top by any reasonable standard and at times bordered on the pathological.

-- In addition to the deconstruction of the laugh and the tears, on-air pundits also obsessed endlessly about Hillary's grating voice. What's more, some asserted that the Hillary campaign had not used her voice in an ad because of internal campaign recognition that people don't like her voice, even though they had absolutely no evidence or knowledge of this whatsoever.

-- For days, multiple news outlets repeatedly ran a truncated version of Hillary's now-infamous quote about Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King. This version of her quote was, as Josh argued, an obvious distortion of what she actually said, and made her sound much more dismissive of King than she had been. The news outlets did this even though her full quote was available on video on the first day of the controversy, and this distortion proved tremendously damaging to her campaign.

-- Pundits kept saying again and again and again that Hillary would be vulnerable in the election because of long-dead "scandals" from Bill Clinton's presidency, such as Whitewater and Monicagate.

This might have been understandable, except for one thing: Hillary's rival candidates clearly decided not to make any issue of these "scandals." The only people bringing them up at all were those same pundits who were predicting that they would matter. While Bill did turn out to be a liability for her on the campaign trail, there was never the slightest bit of evidence that his presidency itself would be a liability -- but pundits kept predicting it would anyway, injecting the idea into the dialog on a regular basis.

-- Multiple pundits asserted as outright fact that the Clintons had hatched a grand plot to paint Obama as the black candidate in order to boost white turnout in the big industrial states.

Let me be as clear as possible here: Yes, the Clintons did racialize the campaign in some ways. And it's conceivable that the grand plot described above did exist. But the evidence on this point was too inconclusive to justify such an explosive charge. And anyone making a cursory effort at fairness would have had to acknowledge this. Instead, many pundits pretended that this interpretation was established reality. It's hard to overstate how damaging this quasi-invented narrative was or how often it was repeated as absolute, unassailable fact.

-- Multiple news outlets and pundits mis-characterized Hillary's remarks about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Many news orgs reported on this the way The Times did when it stated that she had "raised the specter of assassination as a justification for remaining in the race." This is not a factual description of what happened at all. It recklessly suggests outright that she discussed the assassination itself as a justification for staying in.

But that's not what happened. The fair way to report this would have been merely to observe that the assassination came up while she was discussing her decision to stay in. This version accurately conveys what happened -- and even allows room for the worst interpretation of her motives. Yet multiple news orgs and pundits offered a stacked deck version similar to the one run by The Times.

-- Perfectly respectable pundits faced no rebuke whatsoever from professional peers even as they used all manner of epithets on Hillary, calling her a "hellish housewife," describing her as "everyone's first wife," comparing her to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and much, much more.

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And the above is only a very partial list. Does what I've compiled prove that the media as a whole was unfair to Hillary? I don't think that's an answerable question. It's a bit like asking what the weather is at any given moment on all of the planet Earth. Was the media's coverage responsible for Hillary's loss? That's also unanswerable. There are multiple reasons that political races end the way they do. A candidate's own conduct has to be at or near the top of the list.

And yes, the Clintons manipulate the media and take advantage of its shortcomings along with the best of them.

Nor is it easy to answer the question of whether the media was more unfair to her than to Obama. The Illinois Senator was hit by his share of media slime, too. To take but two examples: The false Muslim rumors front-paged by The Washington Post and recycled in bogus fashion by other news outlets; and the media going absolutely bonkers for weeks over the Reverend Wright footage in an incredibly lurid and damaging manner.

Nonetheless, Hillary lost, and as a result the discussion has focused on coverage of her. And here's the bottom line:

As documented above, during multiple high-profile episodes during Campaign 2008, Hillary was subjected to an extraordinary amount of frivolous, crude, unfair, misleading, outright dishonest, and transparently mendacious media coverage that without question had a major impact on this campaign. This should not have been tolerated by any liberals or Democrats, Obama supporters included.

If you don't agree with that, then you need to tell me why most of the above examples I've compiled really aren't any big deal and don't constitute bogus or unfair coverage at all.

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Late Update: I should have noted that we at TPM, too, did cover the bogus Drudge turban pic story. But we tried to point out the defects in the story, something that others refused to do or didn't do aggressively enough.

Also, I should have made it clearer in this post that Obama was hit by a tremendous amount of media slime, too. As I noted above, my compilation of media greatest hits about Hillary does not prove that she got a worse deal. The reason I focused on the treatment of Hillary is that as a result of her loss, there's a tremendous amount of discussion of it right now.