Conservative media bias

That damned conservative media.

Everyone else (especially Atrios) is tracking the Valerie Plame matter better than I could, so I'll say little about it here.

But has anyone else noticed how slow the so-called "liberal" media have been to pick up on the story? You only have a major criminal referral against the White House itself -- the story broke on Friday night -- and it takes three days for everyone to notice?

As of Sunday night, the New York Times had no reportage about the case on its Web site. (It's making up for it today, leading the front page.)

In my local papers -- the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer -- the story has been buried. The Times has carried it on its interior pages Sunday and today (in the latter case, on A6).

The P-I -- reputedly the more liberal of the two -- not only failed to give it front-page play, it has had no reportage on the story at all. (If you go to their Web site even now, you can only find a wire story by digging through the national-news section.)

I've tried calling the National Desk at the P-I to inquire how such a decision could be made. So far I haven't been able to get through, nor have I received a callback. I'll keep trying.

Of course, the letters in the Sunday P-I responding to an Al Franken op-ed were sneering retorts all reassuring us that media indeed has a liberal bias.

One could only imagine how this would have been handled were any Democratic White House -- particularly Bill Clinton's or Al Gore's -- accused of such behavior.