Of course liberal journalists describe themselves as being "moderate" or "centrist" inasmuch as you'll find no liberal Democrat at the DNC who'd describe himself as being a liberal. Suddenly all of them become moderates. Could that be because they know they can't win an election when being so much to the left of mainstream opinion?

Doesn't it strike you as odd that the self-description depicts even-handedness while actual voting among journalists follows a strict liberal line?

Furthermore, you've cherry-picked conservative pundits as to give the impression that indeed there's not much to the liberal bias thang.

Well, let's assume for a moment that your sample were accurate. Take a look at final election results by county. Urban coastal counties, and a few in the midlands voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. Compare that figure to the home markets, and aggregation of aforementioned liberal news outlets. So you want to tell me that journalists at New York's Gray Lady are surrounded by a majority of Democrat voters, that they hang out only with Democrat associates, that they put out hit piece after hit piece on Bush months before election time, but, miraculously, they are "centrists"? No, Richard, they breath the liberal line, they stick strictly to Democrat talking points, and they vote Democrat. Please, don't fool yourself.

In the end I don't really mind how you try to explain away liberal bias. What really matters is market movement. You don't seem to understand that blogs are not about shaping public opinion. No blog can invoke a lasting sentiment based on political leaning. As I've explained before in the other thread the marvelling success of blogs lies not in simply creating an alternative news or opinion source but in resembling a movement which was already there.

The point is that the blogosphere in terms of political leaning is divided into two camps, liberal and conservative, and that both sides attract approx. half of the 'spheres visitors. Which is just fine. Actually, this is the equilibrium where traditional paper- and tv-based journalism once was. However, during the past three decades we've seen an unfortunate development which resulted in news outlets being dominated by liberal hacks, perpetually re-inforcing their one-minded worldview by hiring mostly liberals. Even the emergence of Fox News could not even-out that drift.

Blogs do not restore the old equilibrium by counter-balancing old media. They are a new media that mirrors actual political leanings in the public.

We don't have to fix old media. Fixing corrupt (as in broken) market players is the statist, top-down way of regulating markets. The news slash punditry market has regulated itself by creating the blogosphere, thus leaving old media in the dust because they simply refuse to give to the customer what 50+ percent of them, i.e. Republican voters, want.

And the customer is always right.