Nobody in the know regards Politico as a genuine news outfit. There have just been too many examples of flagrant media bias from them to benefit Democrats.

Here is the latest example, reported by Power Line blog:

One can debate whether the WikiLeaks documents pertaining to Hillary Clinton and her campaign have produced a “smoking gun.” My view is that they haven’t, not yet anyway. But the leaked documents corroborate important portions of the conservative critique of Clinton and of the mainstream media.

The latest example is an April 30, 2015 email in which Politico’s chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush asked John Podesta to approve his writing pre-publication. Alex Pfeiffer of the Daily Caller has the details.

Thrush’s story, about (get this) Hillary Clinton’s supposed fundraising woes, seems designed to generate sympathy, if not funds, for the Clinton campaign. But just to make sure his article was fine by Team Clinton, Thrush emailed it to Podesta in advance of publication. He asked Podesta to “tell me if I fu*ked up anything.”

Thrush stated: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u.” He added: “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this.”

Podesta responded that there were “no problems” with Thrush’s story.

By the way, there is a “smoking gun” in the e-mails, as I blogged in my previous post from yesterday afternoon.

If the mainstream news media were doing their jobs, we would be hearing all about what the WikiLeaks e-mails tell us about Hillary Clinton. But instead, we get this:

Let’s review peer-reviewed studies on whether there is any media bias, and which way the media bias goes.

Here’s a UCLA study on media bias.

Excerpt:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.”

Here’s a Harvard University study on media bias.

Excerpt:

The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture… of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).

When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.”

And more from a study done by the radically leftist MSNBC.

Excerpt:

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

The donors include CNN’s Guy Raz, now covering the Pentagon for NPR, who gave to Kerry the same month he was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq; New Yorker war correspondent George Packer; a producer for Bill O’Reilly at Fox; MSNBC TV host Joe Scarborough; political writers at Vanity Fair; the editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition; local TV anchors in Washington, Minneapolis, Memphis and Wichita; the ethics columnist at The New York Times; and even MTV’s former presidential campaign correspondent.

Those are the facts.

I presented the two academic studies to a Democrat I know who was complaining about Fox News, and he said that Harvard University, UCLA are biased against progressives. He is an avid reader of Politico, along with the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and MSNBC. I’m sure that they would all agree with him, that those published, peer-reviewed studies are from conservative hacks.