By Mike Johnson

Those professional political consultants who told us 18 months ago that 2008 was going to be an election of seismic change should raise their retainers.

How many elections compare:  Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan?

This was as historic as those and in some respects maybe more so.  This election produced transformational change:

• in the way we elect our leaders, who elects them, and how they raise their money;

• in the direction in which the country is headed, both domestically and internationally;

• in the two parties, how they define themselves and how they now approach the incessant, interminable quest for political power.

• in our society where change that has been occurring gradually for sometime, but never really appreciated until now.

The election did something else.  It exposed us to the profound changes in the way entertainment and news media treat politics and politicians and it is not change that we should embrace.

Look at three categories of change that all have the capacity to alter the way we get information and turn it into the kind of knowledge we need to make intelligent decisions.

Media Bias

One is what is popularly referred to as media bias, that inclination to take sides, to lean coverage toward one side or another or one individual over another, mostly because of the political or ideological preference of reporters, editors, producers, directors, performers and company executives.

There is little doubt about the imbalance in the treatment of politics and politicians.  It is neither fair nor balanced.   How much is the result of conscious and deliberate partisan or ideological favoritism is another question, although that’s where the circumstantial evidence takes you most of the time.

The evidence in the Presidential campaign was overwhelming.  Several studies found imbalance in the number of stories about each candidate, the number of favorable stories, the number of pictures, the portrayals of those pictures, the number of minutes of air time devoted to each candidate, the tone of the interviews, the “gotcha” questions.

There was little coverage (some had it below 20 percent) devoted to policy issues versus personalities and scandals, and there was clearly imbalance in the treatment of subjects ranging from negative advertising and fundraising to age and inexperience.

According to studies, the late night talk shows did twice as many jokes about Republicans as Democrats and the morning news shows produced twice as many stories about Democrats than Republicans.   The differences in tone of interviews of and about McCain and Obama on such shows as The Today Show and The View were pretty spectacular.

The disparities weren’t lost on a public, a majority of whom told researchers that thought media are biased, that they were deliberately trying to help their favored candidates and that they—the media—are a bigger national problem than campaign contributions.

The second characteristic is in the distinctions between news and entertainment.   They’ve been blurred or downright obliterated in every aspect of the industry, with the possible exception of the evening news, where Charlie, Katie and Brian still seem primarily focused on news dissemination, biased or unbiased.

The convergence of news and entertainment has been evolving for sometime, maybe since the advent of cable news.  But it has gotten harder and harder to distinguish between those delivering news to your TV or doorstep and those delivering propaganda designed to tickle your ribs, inflate your ego or make you angry.

Today, the airwaves are filled with the rants of O’Reilly, Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, Don Imus, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and countless others in print and broadcast who use politics as an entertainment medium.  And now, more and more, shows such as Saturday Night Live and the View, and movies such as W, and entertainers such as Jay Leno and David Letterman, are using entertainment as a political medium, not just entertaining, but advocating.

The third characteristic of change in the media is its emerging electronic diversity and spontaneity.  The emergence of the web as a news medium is transforming the way we get news, absorb it, understand it and react to it.  When information shows up on the web, much arrives raw, with no filters, no editing, little civility and no fact-checking, from wanna-be reporters on ego trips.   It is up to us, and the mainstream media that feeds off of it, to distinguish between fact and fiction and information and knowledge, and that isn’t easy.

Some pundits, a lot of politicians, and many journalists agree that the industry is changing, but most will argue that there’s nothing that can be done about it or that a biased media really doesn’t make a difference in outcomes. So live with it.

That conclusion is both naïve and lazy. The media do make a difference. They did in the defeats of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

The media over-simplify issues, create victims and villains where there are none, foment dissention, polarize people and politics, and create an atmosphere in which civility, good governance and productive public dialogue are made more difficult.

That’s not healthy and I would guess a good many good, practicing journalists would agree and would like to see transformational change in the industry as much as the rest of us.