Mark Steyn on Media Bias and Media Anger

Mark Steyn has a humorous but telling post about media bias over at the corner. Steyn is reacting to an article in The Washington Post by Howard Kurtz. The Kurtz piece is about how the media is mad at the McCain campaign and they aren't going to take it anymore. Steyn responds:

Yes, indeed. Howie feels the press is being "manipulated" by the McCain campaign.

Maybe it is. A conventional launch strategy for a little-known vice-presidential nominee might have involved "manipulating" the media into running umpteen front-pagers on Sarah Palin's amazing primary challenge of a sitting governor and getting the sob-sisters to slough off a ton of heartwarming stories about her son shipping out to Iraq.

But, if you were really savvy, you'd "manipulate" the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix, comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob? death-match. You'd not only make the press look like bozos, but that in turn might tarnish just a little the fellow these geniuses have chosen to anoint.

Humorous but there is also a lot of truth in there. McCain picked Palin and the media went unhinged in the attempt to find something--anything--to bring her down. Their approach was so obviously biased and unfair that there was backlash. McCain didn't cause the backlash, the behvaior of the mainstream media at large did.

Regardless of the outcome of the November vote, I can only hope that this negative attention the media has recieved this campaign will result in some positive changes. And changes more sweeping than demoting Olbermann and Matthews from often-on-camera political anchors to often-on-camera political analysts.