I know I shouldn’t be surprised when the U.S. news media ticks me off. Still, it does with regularity. I watched reports of Hillary in Puerto Rico, talking all about the win, little about the very low turnout, and nothing about the DNC ruling that signaled the middle of the end of her campaign. They talked about her looking forward to South Dakota and Montana this week, without noting that Obama leads in the polls there.

Then they talked about Obama leaving his church. Guess what? They used it as another excuse to replay for the ten billionth time the infamous “God Damn America” video, as well as other stuff that makes Obama look bad.

When I see “studies” that claim that Hillary has gotten a worse ride in the media coverage, I really have to question the data. Had Hillary been given even equal coverage, then the media would have called her campaign all but over quite some time ago, instead of propping it up like a corpse you need to make look like it’s sleeping so nobody’ll notice.

In fact, the idea that Obama had been getting unfairly positive press was itself an incorrect impression; it was the result of Obama drawing huge crowds which were newsworthy in themselves. But every time the media simply showed Obama in front of a huge cheering audience, this was somehow an example of media bias in his favor. In those early days, everything was going well for Obama; how is it biased media coverage to report that someone is doing well when they’re doing well?

But when, of all things, an SNL skit tweaked them on the concept, they went into full attack mode, leaving Hillary pretty much alone except for the Bosnia sniper fire incident. And nobody seemed to mind when Hillary had been getting only positive coverage before Iowa, deemed “inevitable” by a media that seemed eager to award her the nomination before even the first election had been held.

Nor has this same media, going negative on Obama after believing they gave him too good coverage, made the same about-face with McCain, who they continue to fawn over. While making a huge deal over Obama’s mixup of the names of concentration camps his grandfather helped liberate, they are giving McCain a bye not only when he got troop numbers in Iraq completely wrong, but also when he stood by his incorrect assertions, claiming them to be true when they were clearly not. This after endless negative stories on Obama and his preacher problem, and almost no bad coverage of McCain and his problems with multiple preachers.

And yet somehow, a study was able to parse the numbers to show that not only Obama got more positive press coverage than Hillary, but both of them got much better coverage than McCain.

Like I said, you have to question that assertion.

Update: Ah. The study only covers the campaign up until Super Tuesday, something you have to read a bit down in order to notice. The study, for some reason, decided to stop checking just before the media went medieval on Obama.