[i]Every journalist considering running a positively toned story about Barack Obama from now until November will now have that little bird chirping inside his or her head, asking, "Am I being objective?"[/i]

They should hear that bird chiping for every story they work on all year.

And the stories that AREN'T positive in tone have until the past week, all been strangely apologetic. If the folks at NYT start to believe that Obama's election is as much of a slam dunk as most of them seem to hope, they MIGHT start looking into some of the things Obama's actually reading off of that teleprompter, and not writing the 18th story that week about his "charisma" or reporting unrelectively on the platitudes he's going to rain on the public without discussing the staggering costs attached to them or the social implications.

Your link to the LA times piece is contrarian and impossible to square with the actually quantity and tone of the gulf of output in the press on the two major candidates. It makes perfect sense once you realize that the people who make up the media donate to democratic candidates by a 10 to 1 margin.

Knowing that they have an obligation to be evenhanded, that chirping bird is all they've ever had since someone though the broadside should be a broadsheet anyway. Why anyone would think it's such a burden NOW sort of makes me wonder how much more unsophisticated they could possibly get.

As for the almost pouting sounding tone of: [i]"Here's your article on McCain"?[/i] followed by no opinion or even information relative to US-EU relations, gives me [i]some[/i] sense that at [i]some point[/i] we can see something a little substantive more on topic, but have to ask myself why it was even necessary to remind people of that lack of actual interest in their chosen area of focus at all?