Better Practice Your Backstroke

[Harold Evans, presumably asking how one breathes underwater.]

"With the messiah safe at last, some of the notabilities of press and tube are climbing out of Barack Obama's media tank with tales of what's been going on in there.

It's an article of media faith that everybody with a press card is incapable of showing bias - with the exception of a few newspapers like this one, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and, of course, Fox News. Anyone who says otherwise is a vacuous irrelevancy. So when someone strays off the reservation it's front-page news, even when it's not on the front page.

Deborah Howell, the ombudsman (a Swedish word her newsroom now defines as "newsroom harpie") at The Washington Post finally had enough on Sunday and took her newspaper's best and brightest severely to task for allowing its reporters and editors to climb into that tank. "Readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama," she wrote. "My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that [readers] are right on both counts."

Even before Election Day, Harold Evans, once editor of the Times of London and the London Sunday Times, was even blunter, perhaps because as the former editor he no longer has to risk life and limb walking among his former colleagues: "It's fitting that the cynicism 'vote early and vote often' is commonly attributed to Chicago's Democratic boss, Mayor Richard Daley, who famously voted the graveyards in 1960 to help put John F. Kennedy in the White House. In this 2008 race, it's the American media that have voted very early and often. They long ago elected the star graduate of Chicago's Democratic machine, Barack Obama."

In fact, Reuters, the British news service that most slavishly follows the line of least resistance to bias, isn't even waiting for the inauguration. Most of the media refers to the new president as 'President-elect Obama.' To Reuters, he's occasionally already 'President Obama.'"

-- Wesley Pruden, on how even the media's fish are drowning "in the tank", for The Washington Times.