Kentucky Post still right-wing after all these years

The Kentucky Post???

Yes, this article is about the remnants of the Cincinnati Post and its northern Kentucky edition, the Kentucky Post. The Post became an Internet-only publication this past New Year's Day.

I read the Post for years when it was a print daily, and by 1988 it was clearly conservative. By the end of its print era, its editorial stance was kookish, as seen in its 2007 editorials claiming Hugo Chavez is a dictator and spreading debunked statistics about his administration. (Unlike Bush, Chavez was democratically elected.) Even its articles that were not editorials bore misleading headlines, such as one that incorrectly claimed that the new Rockefeller drug laws were working. (The headline was parroting official government propaganda.)

The 'Net-only incarnation of the Kentucky Post appears to be no less out of touch. It's still owned by the E.W. Scripps Company, which carries loopy op-eds from the Scripps Howard News Service. Like today, it ran one from Bonnie Erbe that was headered, "Is The Media Pro-Obama?"

Are you kidding???

Surely the media is more pro-Obama than pro-Nader or pro-McKinney - but they clearly favor McCain over Obama. The media shrieked for months about Obama's membership in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church (as if Obama somehow caused Wright to make controversial statements), but there's been hardly a peep from the media about McCain actively seeking support from right-wing bigots like Rev. John Hagee.

I think there's even less doubt where the media stood in the primary. It's been clear since the '90s that the media has wanted Hillary Clinton to someday be the Democrats' candidate. For one thing, the Clinton wing of the party is the one the media finds most ideologically acceptable. For another, it's the wing that's most likely to lose in a general election match-up versus the GOP anyway.

Throughout the current cycle, the media has thrown together so many tenuous anti-Obama stories that anyone who scrutinizes them can see they're grasping at straws.

But they've got a nice racket going. Because they're the media, they can - after displaying a bias throughout the campaign - claim the bias is the exact opposite of what it really is. Thus, this claim is self-discrediting. That Erbe would claim the media has a pro-Obama bias, in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary, is just more evidence of an anti-Obama bias.

Erbe claims the media has paid too much attention lately to Obama's overseas trip, but I think it only seems that way because McComplain simply never does much that's that exciting anymore. McCain's rerunning of timeworn Republican grievances is frankly a bore.

In 2000 and 2004, the Bush campaign manipulated the media more than any presidential campaign before or since. No other major U.S. politician has ever gotten a free pass more often than the Decider.

So the next time you see some talking head bellyaching that the media is more favorable to Democrats than to Republicans, it's just a ruse by the right-wing noise machine - one that the Post has fanned for years.