Sometimes it is really easy to get depressed about how brazenly the media bias shows through, as if they’re not really trying to hide it any more. When the report came out from Spiegel about his support of Obama’s plan, there was virtual silence–it took hours for U.S. media outliets to start reporting on the story, despite the fact that the White House inadvertently sent out a media alert (intended to be only in-house) to all the major news services concerning the story.

And yet, media stories only started to come out in force when the U.S. government goaded a rather strange “correction” from the Maliki government. It is now common knowledge that the White House had to specifically prod the Iraqis to make the statement, and the fact that it was released through a U.S. military news outlet made that all too clear. The statement itself claimed a “mistranslation,” though the nature of such a mistranslation was never provided, and could have meant that the substance of Maliki’s statement was correct but some side details were incorrectly stated.

Never mind all that–when the U.S. media started playing the story in earnest, it was on the theme of “Maliki: Mistranslated?” rather than reporting his support for Obama’s plan. And now that he New York Times has the tape and has given their own translation, the media will almost certainly (a) have moved on, as a pro-Obama story holds little interest for the close dog race they desire, and/or (b) will focus on differing word choice between the two translations as if it confirmed a “mistranslation,” despite the fact that the NYT translations comes out with Maliki saying essentially the same thing.

Watching ABC News’ webcast last night was one example of coloring the story rather blatantly. They used the bogus “mistranslation” claim as they focus of the story and report it as something potentially bad for Obama, showing the large title “LOST IN TRANSLATION?” throughout the whole story.

This is a media which has forgiven Bush fifty or so Watergate-level scandals… a media which ignores dozens of McCain flip-flops, some being complete reversals within days or weeks, usually with juicy videotape to exemplify a blatant flip-flop… a media which has completely ignored the undeniable, fully-evidenced fact that John McCain is and has been for months in direct violation of campaign finance law, and that the Bush White House fired the only FEC commissioner with the guts to say anything about it… this is the media which ignores Phil Gramm calling Americans “whiners” but covers Obama’s “bitter” statement for months, which calls even the slightest policy shifts by Obama “flip flops” outright.

You know very well that had Maliki made a statement repudiating Obama’s plan, calling it a “mistake,” then we would now be in Day Two of a month-long media frenzy about how Obama doesn’t know from foreign policy. Instead, we have both McCain and Bush copying Obama’s foreign policy, adopting it themselves but calling it different names (I mean, really, “time horizon”? How dumb do you have to be to not see through that?), and yet the media pretty much ignores it–instead, we get ABC calling Bush’s Obama-mirroring timeline plan “exactly what Bush wanted,” as if that’s what Bush was trying for all along, and how it’s not what Obama has been pushing for more than a year now.

Like I said, it’s rather depressing. One can only imagine that on a level playing field, where both candidates accomplishments and embarrassments were given equal play, Obama would be ahead by double digits in every poll. That he’s still ahead at all in this media environment is nothing short of a miracle.