I’d point to a few other links that people might find useful in this topic. Mickey Kaus lays out a number of useful criteria to judge bias. Jay Rosen has a great explanation of the most important bias in political news: the horse race frame.

And if I might self-promote, I’ve blogged about this as well – this excerpt from a draft of my book Television and American Culture discusses a number of media biases in relation to Fox News and The Daily Show, and this post emphasizes the emotional bias of television that connects to many of your points above on the structural biases of the journalism system.

I think many people would agree with you. Others, however, would argue that Fox is a welcome corrective to a generally liberal media that tends to demonstrate “a clear tale of consistent slant” but to the Left. So, how do we adjudicate these claims? In the next post I’ll present some data that tries to assess whether the media, including Fox, is biased, and in what direction.

Ah, someone notices my clever phrasing! Kudos to you.

You raise an important point: if McCain ran a demonstrably worse campaign than Obama, wouldn’t one expect the news coverage to favor Obama? You can’t very well blame the press for stating the obvious – that’s not bias, that’s good reporting! A complete answer would require a separate post. But I would suggest that the generally positive coverage Obama received compared to McCain reinforces my point about a “structural” biais in news coverage more generally. That is, because the news media tends to cover campaigns as if they were a horse race, events become interpreted through this broader paradigm – and in 2008 that tended to favor Obama. To take an example: consider the financial collapse and how the two candidates reacted to it. McCain briefly suspended his campaign, threatened to pull out of the debate and then debated after all. Obama largely did nothing. Neither candidate’s action can be said to have done anything to address the crisis, but in the end the media narrative, with its intimation of McCain’s erratic behavior, ended up benefiting Obama. Had the media narrative instead focused on the substance of the policy debate, rather than on how the candidates appeared to react tactically, one might have seen a different tone in coverage. That’s what I mean by structural, as opposed to ideological, bias. I’ll have more to say on this in a longer post.