Now here's bias

I idly entered "iconoclast" into Google and landed at this column by Charles Krauthammer. He makes the usual case about liberal bias with one distinction: He cites a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that found the press far more critical of George Bush than John Kerry in the weeks before the election.

This is serious stuff, if true, because the Project for Excellence folks are serious people. So I went to the Project's summary of its study. Sure enough, Krauthammer was right. But what he didn't mention was that the results were almost exactly the opposite of coverage in 2000, when Al Gore took a press beating while Bush got off lightly. How does liberal bias explain that? The study attributed at least some of the difference in coverage to Bush's lousy debate performance.

Which goes to show, when you are looking for bias you can nearly always find it -- even in conservative columnists.