When does the media hold GOP feet to fire?

In his victory speech after sweeping the so-called "Potomac Primaries," Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, took the opportunity to trot out an old GOP talking point about the Democratic Party.

According to Mr. McCain, the Democratic nominee to be the next president would “promise a new approach to governing but offer only the policies of a political orthodoxy that insists the solution to government’s failures is to simply make it bigger.”

Coming from a group that cedes the Bill of Rights to the executive branch, has created the post-WWII national debt, created the largest federal bureaucracy since the 1930s, and spent more money on the boondoggle in Iraq than the US spent in more than a decade in Vietnam, this kind of folderol is rarely challenged by the media.

There seems to be an active group think in the media that allows certain story lines to continue without challenge.

For example, the conflation of the occupation of Iraq with the so-called war on terror is not only not challenged, news outlets speak of it as fact. The GOP has been pushing the notion that withdrawing from Iraq is equivalent to capitulation to al Qaeda to the point that arguing for immediate withdrawal is considered irresponsible.

What happened to the Fourth Estate? There seems to be two forces at work here: the consolidation of media ownership and the media's fear of bias.

The consolidation of ownership has been well-documented, but its influence on reporting is anecdotal at best. No objective measure can be made of the decisions to air or kill/print or spike a story. Reporters will tell tales of having a publisher screaming about a story. Almost every journalist knows someone who was disciplined or fired for working a story that the powers that be didn't like.

More insidious is the media's fear of appearing biased. Even the clearly right-wing Fox News pays some homage to the notion of objectivity. Note the presence of Juan Williams on its Sunday morning programming and the continuing saga of Hannity and Colmes.

But to be fair, those on the right are far less concerned with fairness and accuracy as their counterparts on the left. Most newsrooms are not political monoliths in spite of what most Americans believe (e.g., "The New York Times is liberal, the Washington Times is conservative."). There are as many opinions in the average newsroom as there are in the country. But what is evident is that journalists who are politically left go out of their way to give the right a voice. These journalists are so sensitive to accusations of bias that they go into paroxysms of self examination at the mere suggestion that something wasn't fair. To challenge someone on facts is now seen as having a bias; therefore, reporters don't do it with any frequency.

The GOP knows this, and it continues to manipulate the media to report things as it wants. The answer to the question is never.