We're beginning a new phase of Election 2008. The old precept that Fox had a hate on for Hillary Clinton turned on its head as the primaries progressed and Clinton turned out to be their pawn in a game to run against Obama, who they perceive as the weaker candidate, right? According to the Washington Bureau's Swamp, back in 2007, "Clinton press folks have been saying for months that they receive far harsher scrutiny than Barack Obama, and Howie Kurtz has his suitably sweeping take on that in today's Washington Post. The piece hits all the points you'd expect -- her dip in the polls, for instance, was widely portrayed as a plunge, which it ain't. " "Kurtz makes a convincing argument for the existence of a double-standard in the coverage (rooted in gender?). Clinton gets attacked for attacking, he suggests, while Obama got a free pass during 10 months of relentless, if decorous negativity. " "Valid points, all. Kurtz glosses over the self-fulfilling prophecy angle , hammered by TNR’s Michael Crowley, who claims Clinton’s decades-old paranoia about the press creates animus that boomerangs on the candidate. (The flip side, of course, is that Obama’s press people cleverly play good cop with reporters to accentuate the contrast.)" "The thing that really stuck out in Kurtz’s column was this utterly amazing assertion by Time.com’s Meta-Man Mark Halperin: "Your typical reporter has a thinly disguised preference that Barack Obama be the nominee. The narrative of him beating her is better than her beating him, in part because she's a Clinton and in part because he's a young African American. . . . There's no one rooting for her to come back." Do you buy it? Well, the primary is essentially over now. Let's see how fair the LIBERAL media is going to be on McCain. Because we already know what to expect from FOX, or do we? http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2007/12/media_bias_against_clinton.html