I got into a huge argument with a friend in the UK last week about media bias. I claimed that while conservative howling over a thoroughly left-wing biased might be overstated, it was obvious that most major news outlets are dominated by liberal leaning reporters. Inevitably that makes objectivity impossible. He disagreed based some research he's done on news content, but we both agreed that a much bigger problem is that reporters aren't trained to know much about the stories that must write.

However I am going to send him this disgustingly heroic story about Ralph Nadar that I was forced to listen to on NPR yesterday (small confession, when I jog I either listen to CD's or the radio, and in Indianapolis, it's either country music or NPR.....perhaps I should consider silence).

However it's not just the socialists at NPR who can't stop talking about Nadar. Check out this Seattle Times op-ed on him. The friggin guy is everywhere.

Setting aside the fact that Nadar is annoying self-righteous and morally replusive on a variety of issues, most notably markets and free trade, he's also not the only third party candidate who may very well influence this election. Why doesn't the press even bother to consider Michael Badnarik? If he can pull conservative votes away from Bush, and he almost certainly will, doesn't that have the same impact has Nadar? Oh yeah, I forgot that Badnarik hasn't heroically saved us all from Pintos that were never dangerous to begin with.