But what gets me is that McCain has completely gamed the system- his loan scheme with public financing then opting out is currently not even an issue on the show, and it would seem to me that would be at least mentioned. Of course, it is not, for whatever reason. Additionally, this is even more egregious when you consider that this is McCain’s signature issue. His name is on the damned bill, and the message he has sent is that the bill is a joke. Hell, aren’t there even lawsuits against the man on the issue?

I never much bought into the notion of liberal media bias (and you can search the archives for my past thoughts on it, I am too lazy), but the longer I am outside the Republican hive mind, the more I recognize that liberal media bias may be the biggest fraud the right-wing has ever gotten away with. It is absurd

Amen.

The coverage curve of the Iraq conflict looks, I have a feeling, a lot like the coverage curve of Kosovo & Bosnia. Peace is boring. You report on it once and then you've reported the whole thing.
(Note: not an assertion that Iraq is "peaceful", only that the MSM has bought that particular pile of hogwash from people like Bill Kristol, and Bithead).

As a rule Americans aren't interested in what goes on in the rest of the world unless the rest of the world is blowing up, burning down, or struck by a tsunami.

That's not fair, all it really takes is a young white blond woman going missing.

Unfortunately, that also means that Americans tend to be surprised when events overseas have some effect on them.

I have no doubt that the world ought to work that way. But it doesn’t. Look at the most trafficked sites selling BlogAds. They’re dominated by celebrity gossip sites, with only a handful of giant community blogs breaking into the top echelons. Perez Hilton gets 52.6 million page impressions a week. DailyKos, by far the most popular political blog community (which, by the way, isn’t primarily about war coverage) gets 6.9 million. The topic site with a foreign affairs angle, The Agonist, gets 548,000. Yes, people should be more interested in Afghanistan than Hollywood. But, alas, they’re not.

That's quite correct, james, but at the same time, let's not lose sight of the fact that there was a lot of anti-war traffic on TV, and yet none now that the thing looks to be a win for us. Clearly, the news orgs didn't feel limited to gosspi when "reporting" anti-war stuff. Now, suddenly they do feel that limitation? I'm not sure I buy that explaination.

Beyond that, given the amazing amount of information available on the Internet and, yes, even television, it’s simply not the case that people interested in getting in-depth coverage of the daily happenings and intelligent commentary on the longer term trends in these conflicts can’t get it easily

Then clearly, the issue is not that it's not being covered, it's just not getting pushed the way the anti-war stuff was.

And so, we end up right back where we started this conversation: Press bias.