Back on November 8th, I wrote:

Once the press signaled very early on this year that it was going to play favorites--and really play them hard, it was very, very smart of Bush's team to simply ignore them, and end-run their messages past the legacy media. I don't know how much Bush and company could have predicted it, but it had the effect of absolutely driving the press mad, causing them to crank out absurdly biased piece after absurdly biased piece to the point where faked stuff like Ra^therGate started happening. Added all together with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the sheer weight of much of press' negative coverage simply canceled itself out in the public's eye.

2004 should be remembered as the year when the nation's media elite were so committed to the goal of turning President Bush out of office that some were willing to sacrifice their own reputations for it. Their supposed commitment to fairness and balance evaporated in the public mind.