Virginia Politics-Tim Kaine and the press

The Washington Times has a article titled A free pass for Tim Kaine? It desribes how the media bias has shown Kaine in different light than Kilgore. That should be expected right? We all know how the press has treated Kilgore.

• Although Tuesday's gubernatorial election is a tossup when it comes to Virginia voters, Democratic nominee Tim Kaine would surely win a historic landslide if journalists covering the election were polled.
  When the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs analyzed the content of news and opinion pieces in The Washington Post and the three largest papers in Virginia during a two-week period last month, they found that a majority of evaluations of Mr. Kaine (51 percent) were positive, while more than two-thirds of Republican nominee Jerry Kilgore were negative. The differences became even more pronounced when op-ed pieces and unsigned editorials were examined: Sixty-five percent of the signed columns and unsigned editorials were pro-Kaine, while 80 percent of those on Mr. Kilgore were negative.

80%....wow! It is a wonder that Kilgore is still in the race. That amount of bias should kill any campaign. On the hot button issue of say the death penalty, it was portrayed this way

• When Mr. Kilgore emphasizes his support for capital punishment or his strong stance against providing taxpayer benefits for illegal aliens, he is routinely caricatured as mean-spirited or bigoted. Mr. Kaine, by contrast, tends to get softball treatment. On the death penalty, for example, one of Mr. Kaine's first death-row clients after coming to Richmond 21 years ago was Richard Whitley, who had raped and murdered an elderly neighbor in Fairfax County. Mr. Kaine, who did not dispute Mr. Whitley's guilt, said following his 1987 execution that Virginia's death penalty was analogous to practices in the Soviet Gulag. Mr. Kaine says that despite all he has done to stop the death penalty, he can now be trusted to enforce the law.

So who was really surprised about newspaper endorsements? Heck, they endorsed Kaine long ago by printing up all that bias against Kilgore. The WT op-ed ends with this line

• If Mr. Kilgore is victorious on Tuesday, he can rightly claim to have defeated two adversaries: Mr. Kaine and the local media.

I agree with that 100%. This has been a battle and it ends tomorrow. Vote for Jerry Kilgore!