We're Sorry!

Both Time Magazine and Newsweek have been criticized during the campaign for being biased towards Barack Obama. They routinely published cover stories of Barack with less-than-critical subject matters. However, after two cover stories about certain aspects of Obama were published, the campaign was less-than-pleased:

Last spring, when Newsweek ran a cover portraying Obama as the elitist “arugula” candidate, followed weeks later by a cover story in which editor Evan Thomas wrote Obama an open memo on dealing with race, the campaign suddenly stopped cooperating with the magazine’s quadrennial book project, which requires behind-the-scenes access. Thomas had to fly to Detroit and try to assuage Gibbs during a campaign flight before access was restored.

“I thought the Obama campaign was overreacting to those two covers,” Thomas says. “They thought we were overly concerned with race.”

Is it just me, or does it seem odd that journalists were coming to the campaign to apologize to them? Shouldn't it be the other way around? If the media are balanced and the watchdogs we assume them to be, it seems unbecoming for such a thing to happen. While the liberal media bias is often laughed at, it is no doubt present to some extent (it happened during times of the Bush administration as well). It will be interesting to see how the media's relationship with the Obama administration develops over the next year.