Are Republicans being sore losers by crying media bias?

Mitt Romney may have been gracious in his defeat in the presidential elections and called for an end to partisan posturing, but pro-Republican news outlets are still licking their wounds and blame the liberal media for the party’s loss in the elections. Fox News carried an editorial written by Richard Noyes of the Media Research Centre, in which he came up with five reasons why the liberal media’s alleged bias against Romney could be one of the main reasons the Republican candidate lost. In a scathing editorial, Noyes said that the liberal media had gone after Romney when it came to hunting for facts or making him sound like he’d made errors, something they didn’t do as much for Obama. He also argues that the moderators in the televised deabtes fought more in favour of the President than his contender, at times going out of their way to bail the president out of uncomfortable spots:

Moderators are supposed to ensure both sides get a fair hearing, not pick sides. By leaping into the fray, Candy Crowley epitomized the media’s itch to tilt the scales this year — again, in Obama’s favor.

He also pointed to the media ignoring Obama’s poor handling of the economy and the incident in Benghazi, Libya, where the US ambassador was killed. [caption id=“attachment_518378” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Boosted by the media? Can Obama’s victory really be attributed to the media? AP[/caption] Conservative media outlets have been seething at what they see as biased coverage of the presidential poll throughout the campaigning. But according to John Ziegler, a conservative commentator on Huffington Post, it wasn’t so much that the liberal media was against Romney, as much as the conservatives were unwilling to accept the truth that their presidential candidate needed something special to swing the elections in his favour. In his blog on the site he wrote:

Related to this is also the commercial aspect of the modern news media. There is absolutely no doubt that partisan outlets (which now describes about 100% of the media) do far better with their audiences when they tell them what they want to hear. I personally got an enormous amount of irrational grief (and actually lost twitter followers!) because I dared to write about how I thought Obama would win, even though my predictions were actually more optimistic than what the Left was tending to portend. The fact that I was correct will mean absolutely nothing to my detractors because credibility no longer has any currency in this celebrity driven culture.

He also felt that blaming those who said Romney would lose isn’t the answer, as much as understanding why the party lost. Even Thomas Friedman from The New York Times was of the same opinion, and said the loss should perhaps encourage the Republicans to embrace an attitude that is more centre of right in order to stand a chance in the next election. In his editorial, after the Obama win he wrote:

The G.O.P. has lost two presidential elections in a row because it forced its candidate to run so far to the loony right to get through the primaries, dominated by its ultraconservative base, that he could not get close enough back to the center to carry the national election. It is not enough for Republicans to tell their Democratic colleagues in private — as some do — “I wish I could help you, but our base is crazy.” They need to have their own reformation. The center-right has got to have it out with the far-right, or it is going to be a minority party for a long time

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Perhaps Ziegler and Friedman have a point. In an age when voters depend as much on social media, to foist the blame for an electoral loss on the liberal media is a little too easy. Instead of merely shooting the messenger, perhaps the Republicans need to be looking closer at why the ignored the message that was being given to them.