Commentary blogger examines the impact of media bias on the 2012 presidential race

Mitt Romney will be running against more than one powerful opponent in this fall’s presidential race. Commentary blogger Jonathan S. Tobin reminds us that — in addition to President Obama — Romney must battle an unfriendly press corps.

Other than the conservative strongholds of talk radio and Fox News, few pundits even bother to argue anymore that the overwhelming majority of their platforms tilt to the left. But that still doesn’t stop some of them from trying to deny the obvious. A prime example comes today from the normally sober Howard Kurtz, who writes in the Daily Beast to claim that President Obama has received more unfavorable press coverage than the Republican candidates during the recent GOP nomination contest.

Kurtz bases his assertion on a study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that analyzed the positive and negative treatment of the president and the candidates in the press during the last few months. But the main takeaway from their data is not so much that the press was filled with Obama-bashing — a result that was generated mostly by the fact that all the GOP candidates were critical of the president — but that his normally adoring press corps covered him more like a candidate than a commander-in-chief. That might have more to do with the fact that Obama has been spent more time in the last year playing the partisan than governing. A more insightful conclusion about the press and Obama came from an unlikely source — Arthur Brisbane, the public editor of the New York Times – who wrote yesterday to call out his own paper for their fawning and biased coverage of the president. …

… Brisbane’s comments about the Times could be applied to much of the media’s treatment of the president and the campaign. There is little doubt that the Obama-Romney contest will be largely colored by the predilection of the press to lionize the president as a historic figure while treating Romney as a figure of scorn. Given the willingness of many Americans to disdain the liberal bias of the press, such coverage won’t decide the outcome. But it is a fact that Romney will have to live with and overcome if he is to defeat an incumbent who, despite a poor record, is still being given the Camelot treatment from his cheerleaders at the Times and the rest of the press corps.