The Bankrupt Estate: Bias at the Times, and everywhere else.

The only people who still deny that the media lean to the left are media people who lean even further to the left than the media in general. Even 70 percent of self-described liberals think the media are biased. If not for the journalists who keep swearing it's not true-Dan Rather says bias is "one of the great political myths"-most conservatives would probably leave this topic alone. But in presidential campaigns, which are always covered like horse races, to ignore bias is as foolish as not paying attention to the condition of a racetrack. Some horses run well on a muddy track, others don't. And in America, Democrats always run better in media mud than Republicans.

Political reporters have a built-in bias. Like conventional liberals, they usually measure progress in terms of "bold action" at the federal level, as well as anything that increases the importance of their beat, i.e., Washington. Since Republicans tend to run against Washington, they are perceived as the permanent opposition party, the "others" whose motives are always a little suspect. Journalism tends to reduce political conflicts to good guys and bad guys; 89 percent of journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, and 90 percent in 1996, so it's understandable that Republicans get stuck with the villain role. This translates into a permanent headwind, against which Republicans must struggle constantly to prove that their motives are honest and benevolent.

The 2000 election provides some good examples. When confessed rapist and convicted murderer Gary Graham was up for execution in Texas this summer, the major news networks ran 30 stories suggesting that Bush might be killing an innocent man. The cable channels turned into full-time death-row vigils. Jesse Jackson was omnipresent, comparing Bush to Pontius Pilate and praising Graham as a martyr. Morning news shows lamented Bush's decision to go ahead with the execution-despite the inconvenient fact that the Texas governor lacked the authority to halt the execution.

Now recall how, in 1992, just days before the New Hampshire presidential primary, another southern governor confronted a similar situation. Ricky Ray Rector faced the death penalty in Arkansas, and Gov. Bill Clinton dropped everything to fly home and personally authorize the execution, proving he was no squishy Dukakis liberal. Rector was, to be sure, just as guilty as Graham; but he was also mentally incompetent, which surely would have vexed the press if Clinton had been a Republican. (Rector was actually so brain-damaged that he asked the guards to save his pecan pie for when he got back from the electric chair.)

There were a total of two network-news stories on the Rector case, one before and one after the execution. A few newspapers ran brief stories, but they were generally matter-of-fact and buried on inside pages. The overall coverage was generally favorable, highlighting how Clinton was a "different kind of Democrat."

Consider another telling contrast: In 1992, President Bush visited a grocers convention in Florida. He was shown a new kind of checkout scanner that could read torn labels on supermarket items. The president reacted politely, as if he were wowed by the contraption. Even though the New York Times did not cover the event, they used the pool story and photo of a "amazed" Bush on the front page-and made it seem as if the Republican president had never seen a normal scanner before. For an incumbent during a recession, the story was devastating. It sent a clear message: Bush was an aristocrat, out of touch with real Americans. The media loved it, and so did a grateful Clinton-Gore camp. "Here is a man who sees 20-year-old technology at the supermarket checkout line and looks like an ape discovering fire," railed Gore.

This June, though, it was revealed that Al Gore was a slumlord, and the media response was dramatically different. An impoverished family of lifelong Democrats named Mayberry rented a hovel on Gore's property, 150 yards away from his own Carthage, Tenn., home, and they credibly charged that they were treated terribly by their absentee landlord. This was far more relevant than the fabricated scanner story, and yet it was almost entirely ignored by the national press. If George W. Bush had a family living on disability on his Texas ranch with similar complaints, the election would be as good as over.

Democrats are given the benefit of the doubt; Republicans aren't. For months, Dick Cheney has been forced to answer questions about his stake in the oil-exploration firm Halliburton (whose work, in fact, makes oil cheaper); meanwhile, the Gore family's lifelong indebtedness to Occidental Petroleum is considered a petty nonissue. The criticism that Bush and Cheney are products of "Big Oil" and "Big Tobacco" and the "Gun Lobby" gets a fair hearing in the media, but Gore's longtime practice of selling and growing tobacco is a nonissue, and Joe Lieberman's often zealous defense of the insurance and gun companies is also minimized.

Of course, one could-and should-make the case that the Republicans don't do enough to highlight the Democratic ticket's liabilities; but it is much harder for Republicans to get the media to take the bait. When the Boston Globe exposed Al Gore's lie that arthritis medicine for his mother-in-law cost three times as much as the same medicine for his dog, the Bush camp tried to make it an example of Gore's tendency to invent convenient stories. But the New York Times served as a firewall, suggesting that Gore told the truth and that the Bush-Cheney team was taking cheap shots.

The Gore campaign, in contrast, needs to dangle only the flimsiest of bait to get the media to bite. Richard Berke, the New York Times political reporter, swallowed the now-famous subliminal "RATS" story like a starving shark. By now, everyone knows that the Times reported that the Bush campaign included the subliminal word "RATS" in a commercial against Gore. In the early editions of that day's paper, the Times treated the story as a major scoop, until it was pointed out to them that the RATS item had been spotted and reported by Tony Snow of Fox News a couple of weeks earlier. The Times treatment was wildly overblown-and quite effective at knocking Bush off stride.

It's impossible to address in a limited space all the different ways in which media bias affects the race. The mainstream press essentially decides what the "issues environment" will look like. Bush's effort to make this campaign about "leadership" and "restoring dignity and honor to the White House" flopped in no small part because the press decided that actuarial arguments about drug benefits are a worthier topic for the front page. The New York Times, whose influence has less to do with the voters it reaches than with the editors it sways, has long been on a crusade to make gay-rights issues central to presidential elections. In the 1996 campaign, they ran three front-page articles scolding Bob Dole for returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans. In 2000, they have gotten ahead of both the times and the facts in their coverage of homosexuality and the Boy Scouts.

Ultimately, it's a wonder Republicans ever win at all.