George Stephanopoulos is certainly no Republican and no right winger. At one time, he was a very effective progressive activist: as a younger man, he did yeoman work on the trenches for Mondale and Dukakis, and he became famous as one of Bill Clinton's closest aides both before and after Clinton's victory in 1992.
However, he is now a member of the media establishment, and has even taken over David Brinkley's old chair as the host of ABC's Sunday chatfest, This Week. He also has a blog, and a recent blog entry shows how pervasive the Republican bias in the media establishment is. It was blatantly tilted towards the Republicans, and not because of any personal bias on his part. In his pre-pundit life as a politically active citizen, he was in fact a strong progressive. But as a pundit, he feels compelled to frame anything and everything in terms of the only side which really matters: the Republican side.
The blog entry, dealt with the uncertainty over the future of the US military involvement in Afghanistan, was entitled:
Romney on 'Skeptical' Obama: 'This is Not the Time for Hamlet'
I won't quote the whole blog entry, but here is part of the opening:
President Obama's skepticism about a troop build-up in Afghanistan came under fire on Monday from former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican who ran for president in 2008 and is actively laying the groundwork for a second run in 2012.
"This is not the time for Hamlet in the White House," said Romney. "How in the world can he be saying at this stage the things that he is saying?"
Romney's remarks were made to the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington, D.C., as part of a conversation with Dan Senor who sits on the organization's board.
After invoking the skepticism expressed by President Obama when he appeared on ABC's "This Week," Senor asked Romney: "What's wrong with that? Why not take time?"
"You, of course, hope a president would be deliberate," said Romney.
Stephanopoulos may have been taking a sly dig at Romney, who is much more Hamlet-like than Obama (although not quite as Hamlet-like as George W. Bush.) Romney was certainly the scion of a noble family, like Hamlet (although unlike Hamlet, he let others fight for his country when his country went to war.)
But Stephanopoulos is showing blatant pro-Republican bias by taking Romney seriously as a foreign policy spokesperson. Romney is a fine-looking and intelligent fellow who was a very successful businessman and who also served one not-so-successful term as Governor of Massachusetts. He is a smart guy and a good speaker (good enough to be the lunchtime speaker at a well-financed Washington thinktank's conference)--- but he has no special expertise in foreign policy or military matters. His only credentials in those areas are the facts that he ran unsuccessfully (as a Republican) for President in 2008 and that he plans to take another shot at it in 2012. Romney is in fact, the presumptive frontrunner in the 2012 GOP race: but that is mostly because he has the most money and the whitest smile. That money and that smile barely even got him to Super Tuesday in 2012: the voters rejected him once they finally got their chance to participate in the electoral process.
Romney is just a failed Presidential candidate who was commenting on something he knows nothing about. He didn't even get his literary allusion right: Obama is not particularly comparable to Hamlet. But he is the darling of the Republican establishment. So Stephanopoulos feels compelled to take Romney seriously. This is not a courtesy Stephanopoulos extends to Democratic ex-Presidential candidates. Dennis Kucinich is actually an expert on war and foreign relations, for example, and his comments have not been aired in the mainstream media at all. Even Hillary Clinton, who is the sitting Secretary of State, has not been invited to weigh in on this issue. (And, since I want to stay on-topic, I won't mention the fact that Howard Dean gave a major speech about healthcare at the DailyKos-sponsored Netroots conference with no mainstream media recognition at all.)
Romney is treated by Stephanopoulos as a prophet on this issue, simply because the Republicans have annointed him as Obama's presumptive successor, even though W. Mitt's supposed insights make little or no sense:
Romney, who believes Obama has converted the US from a champion of freedom to a neutral arbiter between nations, said that the president appears as if he is laying the groundwork for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan. Romney warned that such a pullback would destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan.