First you have to win the election. Just ask AlGore who not only invented the internet, he also invented hanging chads and Global Warming and is poised to take credit for the Global Cooling that is taking place as it will I am sure be credited to the Global Community’s reaction to his Global Warming campaign. What attorney ran against Bush in ‘04?

Eric, I enjoyed your writing from Denver. I would’ve liked to see some of it from St. Paul, too. It sounds like you would have had some actual protest action to cover there, and I’d bet that you and SM could’ve made hay while the sun shined. But both conventions are equally related to Dallas. I understand the argument about it being too expensive to cover both, but that simply means that you shouldn’t cover either.

Let me make a simple analogy. Say you have two kids. Neither has shoes. Both need shoes and both have an equal need for the shoes. Why not buy shoes for one kid and not the other? You can certainly choose to do that, but that decision certainly is biased toward the welfare of one child more than toward the other. You can’t buy them for one kid and not the other without showing your bias.

The same thing is true with coverage of equal events. I don’t know if you prefer Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin, or DNC over RNC. But my suspicion is that it’s the former over the latter in both cases, and that suspicion is informed by the fact that your editorial management team chose to cover one over the other. One kid gets shoes, the other kid gets nothing. That’s bias in action.

Bias in practice isn’t just writing bias into the stories. It’s also in deciding what stories to cover. Most of the time, I think that D’s main bias is simply to cover the most interesting stories, and I applaud that. But that’s not what happened here.

I don’t want to go all Ethics in Journalism 101 here, but if, as a news organization, you want to portray yourself as unbiased, then you cannot cover major political events in this manner.

But I think that D has a decision to make. Either admit that it was a mistake to cover the DNC convention and not to cover the RNC convention, or admit that the coverage was biased.

It seems like you’re tired of the controversy, but ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, it just breeds hostility and distrust.