The Fair and the Balanced

Yesterday's inauguration was interesting in many ways. Protesters coming from near and far. Bush's motorcade speeding up when they passed the demonstrations. Bush's Freedom (27 times) and Liberty (15 times) address. Another interesting way to view the inauguration is from a standpoint of the event's media coverage. As far as straight inauguration coverage, Media Matters has compiled some stats showing the ratio of conservative to progressive/liberal commentators on three leading news channels. Fox News unsurprisingly favored conservative commentators 17-6. More surprising perhaps to those who maintain that there is a liberal media bias, was the 10-1 ratio on CNN and the 13-2 ratio on MSNBC.

Another point of interest was the lack of coverage on the counter-inaugural protests going on all day. Someone noted that many media outlets said that they would cover the protests another night, since that night belonged to Bush. Fair and balanced indeed. A collection of links to protest-centric news and blog stories was posted here yesterday. Seems a bit paltry in comparison to the relentless pro-Bush coverage ...