It struck me that sites like Eschaton and Hullabaloo have not been major players in the Obama-jacking of the blogosphere. Funny, that, our pro-war bloggers who ginned up the war talk are now the ones who help Drudge gin up the attacks on Hillary Clinton. Maybe there is something to Taylor Marsh's turn of phrase, "The Progressive Village": not something progressive per se, but centrist Village tactics adapted to exploit and divide a new community.

When two NBC reporters have to take timeouts for saying vile sexist remarks, you know something is wrong.

When a half dozen media critics all say that Clinton has gotten a raw deal, but none say that Obama has, something is wrong.

I have linked to the Gallup tracking poll the past three days. There was a graph designed to show that Obama had "teh momentum." However, Obama flat-lined at 47% and Clinton rebounded to 45-46% for three days straight. It was just on TalkLeft a yesterday as possible evidence that Obama did not have "teh momentum" that the media claimed he had.

Now today, the Gallup tracking poll has no graph. It also dismisses its own findings and attempts to mislead readers that Obama still has momentum. It states, "Obama has been ahead more often than not in Gallup Poll Daily tracking. (In a separate poll Gallup conducted with USA Today Feb. 21-24 and released Monday, Obama did lead by a statistically significant margin.)"

The same press then annoited her the comeback kid after NH but how else can a press treat losing so many primaries in a row?

As in sports when you're losing you comlain about the coverage because all you can see the nagative as piling on.  The press would be just as harsh with Obama if he was losing but he isn't.

Predictably we are seeing a little blowback with Obama and his "obamamania" (did you hear what Cokie Roberts had to say)but it will be too little to late.

As for whether Hillary deserves to be hated by the media, I guess that's a pretty subjective question.  The bigger question to me is, who is the media serving - their own personal feelings about the candidates and the issues, or the larger concept of journalism and the people's right to know?  I think, increasingly, it is about the former - together with the corporate overlords who condone that agenda.  It seems to me that increasingly, almost everything we read and hear is a form of editorializing, even from the so-called news divisions of TV and print media.

And, they also take advantage of people's innate laziness and acceptance that if it comes through your TV, it must be true, as well as their short-term memory problem - a lot of people fail to see that Obama is getting the same kind of kid-gloves treatment George Bush got - and that worked out so well, didn't it?  Same result vis-à-vis the Iraq war - don't do any real work, just parrot the administration and take no responsibility for the public not being informed.

Personally I would rather the debate stuck to substantive issues and leadership style, but the only way the media is going to stop bashing the Clintons is for them to disappear from the political scene.

I'm also split on whether this is how the press is going to treat any woman running for president, or if it's just Hillary Clinton. I'm hoping the next time a woman runs (and let's face it, it's not going to be for another 8 years or so - either Obama gets two terms, or it'll be Obama followed by a white male Republican), America will have grown a bit more from this experience.

This is just my personal opinion - I can't quantify with numbers. But I think it's quite possible that this reason (media favortism toward Obama and/or media bias against the Clintons - take your pick) is how he's won some votes - enough to make the difference.