Any program for conservative revival has to take into account the transfigured media. In the last decade, we have witnessed the decline of traditional news organizations and the rise of the new media. Obviously left-leaning but ostensibly objective broadcast networks and newspapers have lost market share to openly opinionated cable-news programs, talk-radio shows, blogs, and websites.

In an attempt to keep up, the declining but powerful traditional news organizations have become less objective, more attitudinal, and, correspondingly, more liberal. Straight-news reporters now clutter the front pages with opinionated “analysis” pieces; the paragons of objectivity at NBC News moonlight as sharp-edged commentators on that network’s partisan cable cousin.

Though some of the new-media voices are conservative, the consequent shift in the mainstream media has in fact made it considerably more difficult for the Right to communicate policy ideas. The media’s cheerleading for Barack Obama in this election was overt, and conservatives accustomed to highlighting covert liberalism were caught off guard. It does no good to denounce media bias, as the McCain campaign did, when that bias is out in the open, in full view of a public that doesn’t seem to care. Consider the following aspects of the media’s coverage of the election.

Iraq: As the surge strategy paid dividends and casualties declined, Iraq vanished from the headlines. Media apologists will protest that bad news is newsier — “If it bleeds, it leads” — but the media ignored major milestones that were unquestionably big stories. For example, on September 1 the U.S. ceded control of once-murderous Anbar Province to the Iraqi government. A Nexis news search for “Anbar” in the first week of September yields around 500 results. But the rumors swirling around Sarah Palin’s pregnancy and that of her daughter Bristol were a much bigger story for the media that week — six times bigger, in fact. A search of “Palin” and “pregnancy” yields more than 3,000 results. It was as if the Anna Nicole Smith feeding frenzy had been transported to Alaska — and never mind that there was a war being won.

U.S. military deaths in Iraq plummeted over the course of 2008. Thirteen U.S. troops were killed in July, the fewest combat deaths in any month since the war began. That low was matched in October. Yet a Nexis search for “Iraq” and “military deaths” in the week prior to the election yields only 52 results. A search for “Palin” and “medical records” yields 63.

Instead, as fatalities fell, so did the amount of news coverage devoted to Iraq, according to the News Interest Index, a joint project of the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Other than a few brief spikes (accompanying such events as Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress and the 4,000th U.S. combat death), the line charting press coverage of Iraq from early 2007 to late 2008 is a long downward slope. News organizations shifted to covering gas prices, the economy, and the presidential campaign.

During the campaign, Obama was asked, if only rarely, about his opposition to the surge. A few enterprising journalists even asked him if he had been wrong to oppose it. But a sympathetic press allowed him to wriggle free of these uncomfortable questions. The surge may have succeeded in reducing the violence in Iraq, Obama argued, but the Iraqi government had failed to make political progress and would continue to fail as long as our troops remained in the country. The public — and most journalists — lacked the context to see this for the evasion that it was. In truth, the Iraqi government had made steady progress on its political goals throughout 2008. By July, it had achieved 15 of its 18 benchmarks for political progress. The Associated Press scoffed that this progress was “achingly slow.” It was too slow for Obama to notice, apparently, but it would have been nonexistent if he and Biden had gotten their way.

Gradually, the campaign came to dominate every other story, and Barack Obama dominated coverage of the campaign. After things stopped blowing up in Iraq, the news media lost interest in the country’s progress. Thus, an issue — an extraordinarily important issue — on which McCain had demonstrated manifestly superior judgment became subordinate to Palin’s wardrobe and her tanning bed in Wasilla.

Joe Biden: While the national news organizations gave a megaphone to every one of Palin’s enemies in Alaska, they all but ignored Biden and his 35 years in Washington. The charitable interpretation is that Beltway political reporters and editors must have decided that the public was just as familiar with this colorful character as they were. Palin may have been a more interesting story — a fresh female face and a possible game-changer — but that in no way explains the remarkable double standard that characterized the treatment of the veep candidates.

The mainstream media’s investigative pieces on Biden, such as they were, tended to focus on the kind of superficial financial association — his son’s ties to a lobbying firm, for instance — that journalists find more interesting than the public does. A long piece cataloguing Biden’s ever-changing positions on Iraq — against the ’91 liberation of Kuwait, for the ’03 removal of Saddam, against the surge in ’07 — and his other foreign-policy missteps would have better served a public that is not always au courant with Washington’s longer-serving denizens. National Review’s Andy McCarthy filled the gap with just such a piece in our September 29 issue — but where were the rest of the media?

The discrepancy between the media’s treatment of Biden and their treatment of Palin became painfully clear the week that Biden told a crowd in Seattle, “Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of [Obama].” Biden happened to offer this stunning remark the same week that Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe made news. Fifty-two percent of respondents to a Pew Research Center survey said they had heard “a lot” about Palin’s wardrobe that week; only 43 percent said they had heard about Biden’s comments.

The relative scarcity of the Biden story in the news prompted Dan Rather — Dan Rather — to remark, “Certainly if Sarah Palin had said this it would be above the fold in most newspapers today. . . . The newspapers would have jumped all over it and so would have the major television outlets.” When it’s obvious enough for Dan Rather, it’s obvious.

Obamanomics: The mainstream media are generally terrible at conveying the details of complex policy proposals, but their laziness in describing Obama’s tax plans was startling nevertheless. Countless stories referred to Obama’s “tax cuts” for the middle class. Many stories additionally reported that the middle class would get a bigger “tax cut” under Obama’s tax plan than under McCain’s.

In fact, Obama’s plan did not offer any tax cuts, as such. It offered tax relief, in the form of tax credits for a variety of targeted activities. Obama proposed a tax credit for college tuition and an expansion of the existing tax credit for child care. Not all tax credits are objectionable; indeed, McCain offered similar tax credits, though not as large. But it is sloppy to call them “tax cuts,” a term better used to describe reductions in tax rates.

It is true that, excluding McCain’s health-care tax credit, Obama’s plan offered more tax relief to the middle class. But there was absolutely no reason for any reporter to exclude McCain’s health-care tax credit when comparing the candidates’ plans. When the health-care plans are factored in, McCain offered more tax relief to the middle class. McCain’s health-care tax credit was arbitrarily excluded.

McCain’s health-care plan also became the subject of a deceptive ad campaign, funded by Obama’s historically deep and mostly unscrutinized campaign coffers. The ads claimed that McCain’s health-care tax credit would go “straight to the insurance companies, not to you, leaving you on your own to pay McCain’s health-insurance tax.” A few media sources took the trouble to point out that this was a flat-out lie, and that no one would pay more in taxes under McCain’s health-care plan. But at this time most of the media were busy accusing McCain and Palin of fomenting racial hatred every time some bigot unaffiliated with the campaign yelled something offensive at an open event. So much for wanting to talk about “the issues.”

The McCain campaign complained mightily about these and other instances of media malpractice, and the public shrugged. In perhaps the most blatant case of overt bias against McCain, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said that each complaint from the McCain campaign made him want to “find the toughest McCain story we’ve got and put it on the front page, just to show them that they can’t get away with it.”

When the top newspaper editor in the country is openly discussing his strategy to attack the Republican nominee through the news pages and almost no one cares, complaining about bias just isn’t going to accomplish much.

The mainstream media have staked their future on Obama; that was evident in the way they conducted themselves during this campaign. Economic and political forces are driving notionally objective news organizations toward overt partisanship. Now is the time to invest in conservative alternatives and work to secure mainstream recognition for conservative voices. The media game has changed, and we have to get better at playing it.