ABC's Shameful Double Standard

Via Ed Morrissey, compare and contrast Charles Gibson's questions for Barack Obama--the PRESIDENTIAL Candidate with arguably LESS experience than Sarah Palin--and his questions for the Republican VICE PRESIDENTIAL Candidate; then compare those questions to the questions Gibson asked 4 years ago of Democrat VP Candidate John Edwards. The results are stunningly obvious, and can only lead to one conclusion:

First, the Anchoress has a list of questions posed by Gibson to Barack Obama three months ago, who has arguably less experience on foreign policy than Palin and no executive experience at all:

Obama interview:

How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
How does it feel to “win”?
How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?

Palin interview:
Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
Questions about foreign policy
-territorial integrity of Georgia
-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
-NATO treaty
-Iranian nuclear threat
-what to do if Israel attacks Iran
-Al Qaeda motivations
-the Bush Doctrine
-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
-Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin]

Newsbusters, meanwhile, has Gibson’s interview with John Edwards in 2004 after being selected as John Kerry’s running mate. Edwards had less than a full term in the Senate as his entire political background, and no foreign-policy, military, or executive experience at all. Yet Gibson didn’t press Edwards on these points at all. In fact, the entire interview consisted of a hard-hitting interrogation … on how mean Republicans are:

GIBSON: You speak with such equanimity this morning. Didn’t they make you mad last night?

EDWARDS: Oh, I thought they were over the top, completely over the top. And, and actually what bothered me more than anything was in the midst of -I mean, there was, if you, if you got up and went to your refrigerator to get a Diet Coke, you would -you would miss everything Dick Cheney had to say about health care and everything he had to say about jobs. I mean, this is the first, we’ve had 11 straight presidents in this country, Charlie, who have created jobs. This is, until George Bush. You know, we’ve got all these folks who are having trouble with their health care premiums going up, 26, 27 hundred dollars, and what do they have to say about it? Nothing. I mean, don’t people deserve to know from their president and vice president what it is they’ve done and what it is they’re going to do? And instead, all we hear is a lot of rhetoric about, about their opponent. I mean, I just think leaders in this country, the American people deserve leaders who are better than that and do better than that.

GIBSON: Did you get mad, though?

EDWARDS: Oh, yeah. I was, I was, especially about the personal attacks against John Kerry, because they’re false. I know this guy and I know what he’s made of inside and he’s ready to lead this country.

When you consider the comparative softballs that Gibson lobbed to Obama/Edwareds vs. his condescending "interrogation" of Sarah Palin, and then you couple this gaping disparity with ABC News' decision to edit out ALL of the context in Palin's so-called "controversial" answers, it is impossible to reach any other conclusion besides the obvious: ABC in the tank for the Democrats, every bit as much as MSNBC, NBC, CBS and CNN.

I cannot stress strongly enough how disgraceful this is: in such an important National election, in such consequential times, for our supposedly "objective" media to be this blatantly biased? Horrific.

When the closest thing to truly fair or balanced news coverage truly DOES comes from Center-right leaning Fox News, the paradigm of an informed citizenry making informed decisions about its leaders--which once upon a time we were all "sold" in High School civics class-- has now been exposed once and for all for the fraudulent myth that it really is.

These are not journalists acting responsibly, this is a runaway train--a Stalinist propaganda machine that is so drunk on its own "power" and influence that all objectivity is thrown to the wind. The left-leaning Bias has always been there in a subtle way, but all subtlety is long gone now. It is no longer a secret: the whole country knows that its media is trying to manipulate it now.

Still, I am sticking to my prediction that the blatant double standard in the way the so-called "independent media" advocates have treated Sarah Palin (or any Republican, for that matter...) will blow up in the Left's (and Big Media's) faces. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

UPDATE - Even Peggy Noonan understands these dynamics (and she can hardly be accused of being 'on board' originally with the Palin pick):

The slide started with the Rick Warren interviews in August, just as America was starting to pay attention. Verdict? McCain: normal. Obama: odd.

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it's so recent, and so known, we're almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in. They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.

The atom bomb was personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin' ma and pa saying, Tell the neighbors the baby's ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl. Then the rest of it—bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God's will; she asked them to pray that it was God's will. It wasn't the sound of Republican hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it.)

All of this was unacceptable to normal Americans. They experienced it as the town gossip spreading rumor and slander before the new neighbor even got to put down her bags. It offended the American sense of fairness. And—it still lives!—gallantry.

Most crucially, the snobbery of it, the meanness of it, reminded the entire country, for the first time in a decade, what it is they don't like about the left. Really, America had forgotten. Mr. Obama's friends reminded them. Unforgettably.

And it wasn't just excitable bloggers or 24-hour cable news shows desperate to fill the maw. The chairwoman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said this week that Mrs. Palin's "primary qualification [for vice president] seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."