That is, if by “Liberal” you mean “Conservative.” I opened up Google News and was greeted by two headlines showing potential front-runners formally announcing their candidacies in the upcoming presidential race:

The obstacles that could devour Obama
Senator must clear Clinton and funding hurdles

Giuliani greeted warmly by GOP
The former N.Y. mayor tells state Republicans he hopes they’ll back him for president.

Now, that could be random chance–Google might just have put a positive Giuliani and negative Obama story up front by coincidence. However, when I went to the Google Page which listed all the stories under the general category for each candidate, almost all for Obama were non-committal: Obama throws his hat in the ring, Obama to run for presidency, It’s official: Obama is running for president, or Black candidate launches White House bid–the only positive ones were ones that quoted Obama directly, as in Obama Launches Bid To ‘Transform’ Us. He also got headlines like Donner Party Began Here Too, and Black voters still unsure about Obama, for example.

Giuliani, on the other hand, got a few negative headlines, a fair number of noncommittal lot of favorable-sounding headlines:Giuliani rouses the GOP faithful in California, Giuliani leads GOP supply-siders out of the gate, Giuliani fares well for GOP social moderate, and Rudy’s California Gold Rush.

The thing is, you have to really look through the headlines to notice these things, otherwise it just seems like you just saw a news story that’s reasonable and fair. You notice two or three which have different slants, you might think that everything’s being represented equally. But a look at the broader picture reveals a bias. After all, Obama has fewer skeletons in his closet (that we know about) than Giuliani. Giuliani cheated on his wife and had a messy divorce; Obama has a fantastic wife who as seen as a great asset–though neither of these are covered in the mainstream media nowadays. Giuliani is known to be hot-tempered; Obama has widespread appeal.

Almost the only positive Giuliani has is that he was mayor of New York City when 9/11 hit, and like Bush, he got catapulted to high popularity not because he did anything worthy of note, but because he was there and got on camera. This article debunks the Giuliani-as-hero myth, and this article covers his darker side in general–especially making the astute point that had Giuliani been the mayor of New Orleans, he wouldn’t have been so lionized. His “heroic” leadership only looked heroic because of the context, not because of anything he actually accomplished.

And will the media pay attention to the rather unsavory parts of Giuliani’s past? He would likely lose support from the minority communities once people start remembering people like Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Robert Reynoso, and Juval Green, and how Giuliani encouraged police brutality, standing by the police even when they sodomized a Hatian immigrant with a baton or shot an unarmed black man 41 times. If, that is, the media ever gets tired of reporting on fake scandals about Obama ginned up by the Washington Times, and starts focusing on real scandals in Rudy’s past.

So why is it that the media has so much more positive exposure of Giuliani and so little of Obama? Why focus so much on Giuliani’s positives and on Obama’s obstacles?

Gee whiz, you don’t think there’s a conservative element at work in the media, do you? Nah, couldn’t be.