OUR EYES AND EARS.  SURE.

Posted at 8:47 a.m. ET

Ed Lasky at American Thinker alerts us to an excellent piece by Victor Davis Hanson on one of the biggest scandals of this political year - the reckless bias of the news media, a bias that will further erode the confidence of the American people in its self-appointed "eyes and ears."  But do you do when the eyes refuse to see and the ears refuse to hear?

There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnable.

Sadly, everyone didn't know.  Only informed, probing people knew.  And today, students learning the history of that war aren't taught the truth, only the approved "narrative."

Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people.

That is correct, without qualification.  Consider financing of elections.

Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.

Reaction?  More like hysteria.  There are essentially no media questions about the vast sums Obama has raised, how he has raised them, and from what sources?

What about the vice presidential choices?

We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.

And Biden?

By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don’t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad.

But Joe has the most important qualifications of all - he works in Washington and knows reporters.

The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.

So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.

Obama's past:

In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media’s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.

Wait.  Can we ask about his past?  Isn't that McCarthyism, or pastism, or one of those isms they teach at Harvard?

Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.

Oh, but he's an intellectual, always thinking, always evolving.  Or is it just that he's always running.

Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain’s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.

These conservative historians like Hanson - always dredging up embarrassments.  Aren't we supposed to look forward to change we can believe in?  Aren't we the ones we've been waiting for?  Hmm.  Maybe not.

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

But who will be there to tell us to regret it.  Chris Matthews?   The publisher of The New York Times?  Katie Couric?  Jon Stewart?  Al Franken?

And those are the intellectuals.

The alternative media is here, and we're ready.

November 1, 2008.