See! The media is liberal, after all! A study by the Columbia School of Journalism established that the media gave Bush a harder time than Kerry, that Massachusetts liberal. This clearly proves that the media is all communist and loves Islamofascists and that we need affirmative action for the wingnuts in the press rooms.
Here is what the poor wingnuts must face:
The school's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 36 percent of reports on Bush painted him in an unfavorable light, while only 12 percent did the same to Kerry - according to Reuters.
Wow! Take out your paintbrushes, you liberal journalists, and retouch all the stories about Bush with more optimistic pink for the future of freedom.
Of course, the problem the journalists faced in keeping the coverage equally negtive was this:
On the Iraq war, for instance - which was a watershed issue for Bush - the study found that the three network nightly newscasts and public broadcaster PBS tended to be more negative than positive, while Fox News was twice as likely to be positive as negative, Reuters said.
We just don't have enough Foxes.
This silliness is like saying that it would be biased to give the flat-earthers any less praise for their scientific acumen than the other side. Bush gave the media a lot of stupid stunts and horrible mistakes as data. Should all this have been ignored? Or should artificial stories have been invented to make Kerry look equally incompetent? Oh, I forgot, they were! The Swift Boaters. But even that doesn't seem to be enough, no, coverage should have been exactly equally negative, never mind the facts.
Bias does not mean telling the facts, my dear wingnuts, and sometimes facts weigh more towards one side. Bias means not giving each side a fair hearing and not letting them give their explanations for why what happened happened and so on. Bias means weighing the same facts differently depending on whom they affect. But bias does not mean pretending that someone who is awful isn't, just because the other guy isn't quite as awful.