The Media Research Center's Tim Graham notices the fact that the New York Times gives more attention to supermarket tabloid claims about Barack Obama than it gave to tabloid articles about George W. Bush -- but he draws the improbable conclusion that this indicates liberal bias:

The New York Times prizes itself as the newspaper of record, as the very definition of prestige media. So it's a little shocking to see them spreading the latest headlines from the Globe supermarket tabloid. Sheryl Gay Stolberg's mournful story about Obama's “otherness” and how “Misperceptions Stick” about the president began:

Americans need only stand in line at the grocery checkout counter to glimpse the conspiracy theories percolating about President Obama. “Birthplace Cover-Up,” screams the current issue of the racy tabloid Globe. “Obama's Secret Life Exposed!”

…

This must be more publicity for a Globe tabloid concoction than you'd see out of Fox News or the Rush Limbaugh program. But it's used to illustrate how the president is bedeviled by lies. Stolberg didn't seem to consider that the Globe and other supermarket tabloids also published stories about Laura Bush divorcing President Bush, of Bush is “back on the bottle,” and so on. But that didn't seem to outrage the New York Times.

Graham's basic history is correct: The news media, which obsessed over tabloid gossip about Bill Clinton in the 1990s and has given great weight to spurious claims about Barack Obama, took a break in between, all but ignoring claims that Bush was drinking and heading for divorce. Actually, that isn't quite right: During the Bush presidency, the New York Times and other media did still amplify some tabloid claims -- those that were about the Clintons, as I explained in 2006:

At least [Jonah] Goldberg invented his own absurd anti-Gore story. The New York Times and countless other media elites -- David Broder, Tim Russert, and Chris Matthews among them -- chose instead to take the lead from the Globe supermarket tabloid.

The New York Times -- the same newspaper that couldn't be bothered to report a single word about new evidence suggesting that George W. Bush possessed insider information when he dumped his Harken stock -- this week devoted 2,000 words and a portion of its front page to examining the state of the Clintons' marriage, tallying the days they spend together and rehashing long-forgotten baseless tabloid rumors of a relationship between former President Bill Clinton and Canadian politician Belinda Stronach.

Rather than ignore or denounce the Times' decision to interview 50 people for a story about the Clintons' private lives, the Washington media elite embraced it, turning the pages of the nation's most influential newspapers into glorified supermarket tabloids. And television, predictably, was worse.

The Washington Post's David Broder -- the “dean” of the nation's political journalists -- quickly jumped in, suggesting that the Times might have explored the purported Clinton-Stronach relationship in greater detail and declaring the Clintons' private lives a “hot topic” if Sen. Clinton runs for president.

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The New York Times repeats Globe speculation about Bill Clinton, so when can we expect to read on the front page of the Times about the Globe's report that George and Laura Bush have broken up and are leading “separate lives” in part because of “booze problems”?

So Graham is right about the history of the media giving less attention to tabloid reports about Bush than to those about Democrats. But his interpretation of that history is suspect. I have a hard time believing that Tim Graham would really have been happy if the establishment media had spent weeks talking about supermarket tabloid claims that George W. Bush was back on the bottle and that Laura was leaving him -- even if the media noted that those claims were unsubstantiated. Would he be happy if the Times had responded to Globe reports of a coming Bush divorce by devoting 2,000 words to tallying up the number of nights the couple spent apart? Of course not: He'd have denounced it as evidence of “liberal bias,” and he'd still be doing so for years to come.

This strikes me as an example of conservatives having believed for so long that the media is out to get them that they just can't recognize how good they often have it. When the national discourse about a president with whom you're ideologically aligned is dominated by spurious tabloid claims, that's a bad thing. When the national media refuses to give weight to spurious tabloid claims about a president with whom you're ideologically aligned rather than obsessing over them for weeks, that's a good thing.