It is becoming crystal clear to a lot of people besides me that much of the media is supporting Kerry, wants him to win and Bush to lose, and that coverage and stories are being arranged to that end.

There is no objective reason on Earth why questions on Kerry's service would be any more or less worthy of investigation than questions on Bush's service. The amount of coverage given to the Bush controversy is documented. For weeks, newspapers covered it. Reporters swarmed Alabama. Records were demanded. ALL of them. Medical included. The idea that any records could be withheld was considered outrageous. People were interviewed. Interviewees who supported Bush were ignored. Those who did not got a lot of coverage. The most recent AWOL flap was instigated by Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic Party. Could he be considered partisan?

Remember? It wasn't all that long ago.

Now the only media attention the Swift Boat Veterans are getting is a continuous stream of attacks on their motivations, their funding, their conflict of interest, and how outright EVIL they are for even questioning the noble Kerry. In fact, they have been attacked on everything--except the actual statements under discussion. Finally a newspaper that had obviously had as its goal trying to discredit the veterans latches onto one line in a document, and now it's front page news.

The contradictions in Kerry's record, some of which I've posted here, remain unexamined, and usually unmentioned.

The Swift Boats organization, which ran one bloody $150,000 ad, is under furious attack, accused of being a "front" for the official Bush campaign. Well, they should prove it, since that would be illegal.

Meanwhile, Moveon.org and similar 527s have spent literally millions over the past year on a constant anti-Bush barrage. It is funded by people who have been virulently anti-Bush for years. Nobody cares.

Is Moveon.org doing Kerry's "dirty work?" If not, why not?

From Instapundit:

...But this story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down. What's more, lots of people are noticing.

To me, that's a bigger deal than the underlying issue or even, in some ways, the election itself. Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the "Fourth Estate" is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians. And it's unravelling before our very eyes, which I think is the biggest story of the election so far.

The mainstream media in the Age of Cronkite was the all-powerful oracle of politics, usually in the service of liberal causes. Nobody had a choice back then. They do have a choice now, and the media and the Democrats are not handling it very well. There's a reason Gore called the internet people "brownshirts."