Minor bias?

Public opinion rests like an unbroken egg on a kitchen work surface- tilt the surface just a little and you can watch the egg slide and ultimately break.

That's what politicians try to do, and the media are in an irresistible position to join in.

Those are the premises I start with when I look for media bias.

This BBC information piece has been edited as many times as you could conceive of- earlier it juxtaposed Arnie's praise for Bush's singlemindedness with the claim that Bush had contradicted himself over winning the war on terror. Currently it majors on arrests outside the RNC, and the accompanying 'tense atmosphere'. In either case it sows a real doubt in the mind.

[I'm re-reading it, later on, and it has really cleaned up quite a bit. It now strikes me as not unbalanced, although there are little tweaks of weirdness and repetition by which the BBC often means to unsettle or turn-off readers. This raises an interesting point: the online media is more like television that it is like the print media. How many tens of thousands may have read the earlier versions? Yet what we have been left with is better than what many/most people will have read- rather like the way TV news sometimes cleans up a story as they go from the early morning hours to peak-time.]

The BBC opinion piece I pointed out earlier may seem friendly enough, but in fact it highlights the stereoptyped Arnie over the real one. It highlights the stage management of the Republicans over their message, and it makes the RNC look like a simple PR exercise. Of course there are elements of that in all political campaigning- but there's a trade-off between looking good and being good. I think the Republicans would readily admit there is no point looking good if you can't be good when it counts, yet this aspect of their platform is dismissed as window dressing.

By way of contrast, here is a news piece about John Edwards' speech in July. There's only one negative comment in its entirety, and even that is very much of the 'that was the bad news, here is the good' variety.