Editor's note. I'd very much appreciate your input at daveandrusko@gmail.com.

When I ran across Deborah Howell's not me[a] culpa in the Washington Post Sunday, I had just finished reading a collection of post-election profiles of pro-abortion President-elect Barack Obama so sugary sweet you gained pounds just by eye-balling them. Whether they appeared in the same Sunday "Outlook" section that Howell's Ombudsman column ran in or the major news magazines that ran rivers of mushy/gushy stories about Obama, they represented a kind of exclamation point on Howell's conclusion that the Post's campaign coverage had demonstrated a "tilt" toward Obama.

Let's look both at Howell's column and briefly at a wonderful piece in Monday's Washington Times written by Jennifer Harper that places Howell's "Hey, don't blame me!" column in a larger context. The point of Howell's analysis was to concede the obvious–the Post did everything but carpet bomb the McCain campaign while throwing flower pedals in the direction of Obama--but not at the expense of suggesting her colleagues had any ulterior motives.

For those of us old enough to remember Watergate, her unintentionally amusing musings bring to mind John Ehrlichman's infamous "modified limited hangout." For those who don't immediately get the reference, it became a derisive, all-purpose putdown for years afterwards.

The gist is that you know your cover story is no longer operative. What to do? Volunteer part of the truth in the hope that the audience will be satisfied (or so surprised) that you never have to own up to the far more damaging truth safely tucked away.

So, Howell tells us that the Post editorial page ran two and a half times as many laudatory opinion pieces on Obama as McCain and that "Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain." That quantitative measure does not begin to measure the impact of the layers of praise heaped on Obama in the stories and opinion pieces or the vitriolic and dismissive tone of so much Post coverage of Sen. McCain.

In places like the Project for Excellent in Journalism, they also quantify the negative stories. And, of course, there were far more negative stories about McCain than Obama. But mere numbers hardly do justice to the intensity of the assault. If 10 firecrackers are dropped on Obama and 15 nuclear weapons on McCain, are you conveying the full impact when you merely say McCain was on the receiving end of more attacks?

And at the same time the Post did its best to eviscerate Gov. Sarah Palin, there were so few mentions of Obama's vice president, Sen. Joseph Biden, we almost forgot he was still on the campaign trail. Look at the contrast.

As Howell writes, as soon as McCain chose Palin as his running mate, reporters were booking their flights. No one suspected they did so in order to write puff pieces about the first female governor in Alaska's history, an intuition richly borne out by experience.

Biden's first presidential campaigns in 1988 had exposed him as, shall we say, ethically challenged. Virtually nothing was mentioned about how that pattern of behavior had extended long past that first disastrous run. More important, neither did the Post see fit to highlight the seemingly limitless string of gaffes and (to be polite) erroneous statements that flowed from Biden's lips these last few months.

And then there's this "no-kidding" observation that came near the end: Howell acknowledges as how the Obama "deserved tougher scrutiny" about his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago, and his controversial associations.

What a coincidence. The same week Obama is safely elected you discover your paper had kowtowed to Obama, so inadequately covering him that he is still largely a blank slate the day he is elected our 44th President.

Harper's Washington Times piece notes that the public understood perfectly well that the media was tilted. "A Pew Research Center survey released in late October found, for example, that 70 percent of voters agreed that the press wanted Mr. Obama to win the White House; the figure was 62 percent even among Democratic respondents," Harper writes. On the general topic of bias, "A current Harvard University analysis revealed that 77 percent of Americans say the press in politically biased; of that group, 5 percent said it skewed conservative," Harper added.

One other thought. There is considerable discussion just how long and how harmonious the honeymoon will be. Consider these two factors.

1. On the one hand, the mainstream media has an enormous investment in Obama. On the other hand, when reporters, as inevitably they will, come down from their self-induced euphoria, they will have intermittent pangs of guilt for having sold their integrity for a mess of pottage. The former will win out over the latter for sometime. But at the same time…

2. You don't have to be a pro-lifer, a Republican, or even a skeptic to realize that Obama possesses a very healthy ego and has not shown particularly patience with the institutional media, otherwise known as the dinosaur media. He benefited enormously from the Old Guard--the hit pieces on Palin, the recycled stories about McCain from decades ago–but Obama readily circumvented them whenever it served his purposes, which was most of the time. As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post discussed yesterday, Obama built up a formidable digital outreach, choosing bloggers and places like politico.com to announce breaking news.

So, I ask you, when, as President, Obama continues that pattern, only more so, does the "mainstream media" ask for its ring back?

Please send your thoughts to daveandrusko@gmail.com.