I have written many times about how shameful the US media has been during this primary.  Often referred to as 'The Fourth Estate', the press has the role of shaping public perception in politics.  In this (and in fact the last 3) election cycles "The Press" has done a great disservice and failure to the American public and its implications have been felt around the world.

The most recent example of this is the response from the press with regard to the most recent ABC debate.  I will state for the record - that the first half of the debate was about nonsense - but lets be honest - nonsense is all we and the media have been talking about for weeks now and this was the 21st(?) debate - so I think ABC was justified to ask the questions they did.

My, oh my, but weren't those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week's presidential debate.

Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner's personal associations and his electablity. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?

Where indeed. Hillary Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.

That's still a good response now that it is Obama partisans--some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places--who are doing the whining.

The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.

Last fall, when NBC's Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions--a mix of fair and impertinent--he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC's performance as journalistically unsound.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/040 8/9718.html