Today's Doonesbury (you might have to click on July 13 on the Archive Calender) has the NPR journalist Mark wondering if he's part of the media bias problem. Naw, don't worry. His creator won't let him believe that. As soon as he thinks it, his conservative lover (who, by the way, alone among recurring players isn't mentioned in the cast of characters) pops on the scene with these observations:

"Drives you crazy doesn't it? You know why? Because you liberals are hung up on fairness! You actually try to respect all points of view! But conservatives feel no need whatsoever to consider other views, we know we're right, so why bother? Because we have no tradition of tolerance, we're unencumbered by doubt! So we roll you guys every time!"

Mark concedes he has a point, to which the conservative replies:

"See! Only a loser would admit that!"

Goodness, if that's not a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I'm no hard-core conservative. I've voted for a Democrat in every Presidential election except the last one. And even last time I came darned close. I believe in and support many liberal ideals. But the liberal bias in the media is very real and easily observable.

Consider, for example, the current Democratic Party line that "Bush lied" about weapons of mass destruction in Iran. It is a line that has been taken up with enthusiasm by the mainstream press. Read the latest Washington Post article about it, and you'll find nary a mention of exactly what it is that Bush said, or the fact that the British are standing by their intelligence claims.

Or, read George Stephanopoulos's book, All Too Human to learn how the media aided Bill Clinton. There was Sixty Minutes:

Twice during the interview, [CBS executive producer] Don Hewitt called a break and emerged from the control room. He told the Clintons how he'd made John Kennedy president by producing the debates in 1960 and said he could do the same for them. Like a director coaxing his leading couple, he crouched down in front of the couch and whispered, "Just say yes or no. Yes or no, and we'll move on to other things."

There was ABC's Nightline:

From my perspective, the show couldn't have gone better ... What turned the debate was Ted Koppel's using his anchorman's authority to subtly suggest that the attacks on Hillary were misleading. All I had to do was fall in behind and remind viewers that the Republicans were up to their old tricks.

And then there was all the rest:

My goal was to put Paula Jones in the same category as Connie Hamzy - women whose stories were so suspect that their accounts shouldn't be dignified by the media. Most important, I wanted to keep reports of Paula's press conference off television. So I made my case directly to Tim Russert at NBC, Dotty Lynch of CBS, and Tom Johnson, the president of CNN. It wasn't a hard sell ... Although we couldn't quash all coverage, our goal was to bury a one-day story inside the Saturday newspapers. Asked to comment, I called the performance a "cheap political fund-raising trick."