The depressing 2008 campaign

National Journal's Stuart Taylor has a good, fair-and-balanced analysis of media bias and the campaign's race to the bottom:

Some who have been admirers of John McCain think that the war hero has debased himself by using gross distortions to trash Barack Obama and his record. Others see the media fury over McCain's campaign ads as more evidence of a double standard driven by liberal bias at most major news organizations.

Both are right. Although each candidate is responsible for many distortions--hardly a novelty--McCain has lately been leading the race to the bottom. ... At the same time, many in the media have been one-sided, sometimes adding to Obama's distortions rather than acting as impartial reporters of fact and referees of the mud fights.

We still have many great journalists, but I no longer trust the major newspapers or television networks to provide consistently accurate and fair reporting and analysis of all the charges and countercharges. This in an era when the noise produced by highly partisan TV hosts and blogs creates a crying need for at least one newspaper that we can count on to play it straight.

Indeed, one reason that candidates get away with dishonest campaign ads and speeches may be that it is so hard for undecided voters like me to discern which charges are true, which are exaggerated, and which are false.

I totally agree with that last point. Media bias, and the perception thereof, has helped to poison this campaign by creating a situation where there are two totally separate narratives -- an Obama-friendly narrative, and a McCain-friendly narrative -- and never the twain shall meet. Sarah Palin's selection, and the wildly divergent reactions thereto, cemented this arrangement. It's now nearly impossible for any set of facts to come along which would significantly disturb either narrative, because conservatives will blame any and all inconvenient truths on the "liberal media," while liberals will blame any and all inconvenient truths on the "Republican smear machine."

As a result, we're effectively locked into an endless red-versus-blue political war, with citizens free to choose not only their preferred set of opinions, but their preferred set of facts. And those who actually would like to know the true facts seemingly have nowhere to turn. This is not a new phenomenon, but I believe it's gotten significantly worse in this election cycle, and it's one of the reasons this general election -- which once seemed to have great "elevating" potential -- has become so disheartening and depressing for those, like me, who believe that this is a contest of great historical importance with major issues at stake, and that it ought to be decided on the basis of those issues, not idiotic distractions like "lipstick on a pig" and "stupid and unskilled Mexicans" and "sex-ed for kindergartners" and "100 years in Iraq" and who's a "celebrity" and who owns more houses.

Anyway, read the whole thing, which also discusses Obama's scurrilous Rush Limbaugh ad, by which Taylor says Obama "may have pulled even with McCain in the race to the bottom, or even ahead of him." I'm not sure I agree with that, but the ad is certainly not one of Obama's finest hours, by a long shot.