Some of the mainstream media are acting like a person with a hangover trying to figure out what happened last night.

The Washington Post’s ombudsman deals with ‘morning after’ guilt over the paper being in the can for Obama:

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

And now a short pause to allow me to recover from the total shock of that information…..

…

All right, that was long enough. So how did the Post come by this amazing discovery? The ombudsman counted up election coverage from November 11, 2007 to now, and what did she find? Obama got more positive editorials and many, many less negative ones, more stories, more photos.

Really no surprise. And only two troubling things about this confession:

• Too little — With all of this excoriation, the Post never did the simplest and most telling tally — how many positive stories, as opposed to editorials. A newspaper can always tell itself that it’s okay to show bias on the editorial page. Dealing with the bias that was out there on page one is another thing.
• Too late — Isn’t it kind of late to be having this public admission? The election is over. The damage is done. I’d love to keep a good thought and think that they really mean to mend their bad ways. But with the mainstream media these days, it’s a case of ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me year after year after year, shame on me.’

That being the case, this slight blush coming from the mainstream media just strikes as a bit of post-election posturing.