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"Here's the piece, published this morning. The upshot: The political coverage of The New York Times and The Washington Post is \"blatantly biased\" in their vetting of Romney versus Obama. (Guess which way they supposedly lean.) Sample paragraph: \"Republicans cry 'bias' so often it feels like a campaign theme. It is, largely because it fires up conservatives and diminishes the punch of legitimate investigative or narrative journalism. But it also is because it often rings true...\" The evidence: The Times wrote a mean story about Ann Romney's equestrian hobby! And The Post wrote a mean story about Mitt Romney's teenage bullying of a maybe-gay kid! And they both ignored all those juicy weed-smoking details from the new David Maraniss biography! (Never mind that Maraniss works for the Post, and the Times did cover it...) GOP operatives smell bias, and goshdarnit, they're right!\n\nAhem. Let's break this down.\n\n(1) Any story about the relative fairness of candidate vetting that doesn't mention, even once, Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers (or even Obama's shady real estate pal Tony Rezco--remember him? Read all about him in The Times in March 2008!) cannot and should not be taken seriously. It displays right off the bat that its authors have fully swallowed the GOP meme that Obama's past wasn't sufficiently examined in 2008. So insufficiently, in fact, that even before Obama was his party's nominee he had to give a nationally televised speech disowning his former pastor. (Incidentially, The Times's Jodi Kantor wrote a long story about Obama's relationship with Wright in April 2007! A search of the Times's archives for Wright yields more than 2950 results.)\n\n(2) Politico published this story the day after one of its targets, The Times, published an astonishing expose about President Obama's personal oversight of a terrorist \"kill list.\" In what universe is that not vetting? Part of Politico's argument is that these two media outlets have spent far too much time on the silly stuff about the Romney family, chasing stories that have no bearing on candidate Mitt's qualifications for office--but then, in the same breath, they ignore the Times when it focuses, exceptionally, relentlessly, on the truly important stuff like Obama's record on national security. The message from Politico: hey, New York Times--less \"kill list,\" more pot-smoking, OK?\n\n(3) Politico dismisses Washington Post reporter (and, full disclosure, occasional GQ contributor) Jason Horowitz's Romney bullying story with a wave of its hand, not even entertaining the reasons why it struck such a chord, and why it so spooked the Romney team that it responded within hours the morning it was published. The reason is simple: lots of people read the story and thought, \"Wow, I did a lot of dumb crap in high school but I never would've done that.\" The incident spoke to a core suspicion some seem to have about Romney, and that the Romney campaign is clearly worried about: that he's a rich guy with a nasty streak, and that's who he's always been. We can debate how much stock readers / voters should place in such a long-ago incident, but that's for readers / voters to ultimately decide. Surely we're not debating whether the story should've been published, are we, Politico?\n\n(4) More on the bullying story: one crucial reason to publish a story like Horowitz's is to see how a campaign will respond to it. The response tends to be as revealing as the story that spawned it. Politico knows this better than anyone. And one of the reasons that the prep-school bullying story lingered as long as it did was because of ... Romney's evasive response to it. First he said he had no recollection of the incident, then he apologized as though he did. It seemed slippery, vaguely dishonest, lacking conviction--and it came the day after President Obama spoke out in favor of gay marriage, a contrast that wasn't lost on anyone who writes about politics for a living. Which includes Politico! As the Poynter Institute's Andrew Beaujon notes, Politico sure did spend a lot of time covering that bullying story it so abhors.\n\n(5) Let's get macro for a moment. This Politico story was written by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, two people at the very top of the organization's masthead. It's effectively an unsigned house editorial. And it levied a charge of journalistic malpractice at two of Politico's biggest rivals. The house position of Politico, as evidenced by this piece, is that they are fair and their chief competition is not. It's a thinly disguised, fundamentally craven argument for Politico's superiority in the world of political coverage. Let's call this article for what it was. It wasn't journalism. It was business.\n\n Read more on Death Race 2012:\n\nBuddy Roemer's Exit Interview: Rachel Maddow Would Have Been His VP?\n\n[You Know What's A Pretty Good Way of Vetting Candidates? Elections.\n\n](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race#ixzz1wUIi5Q8P)\n\nClusterf*ck To The White House, Or That Time I Almost Saw Obama and George W. Bush Together\n\nTweets from the Peanut Gallery: The 8 Best Responses to the Edwards Verdict\n\nFollow @GQPolitics for more updates from the campaign trail."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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