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Allegations of liberal bias

Others outside of Fox have charged Politico with having a left-of-center bias as well, especially in the wake of its coverage of the Cain scandal. Politico published more than 90 stories on the topic in the first five days of the story. By the end of the first week, according to one online count, Politico had published a total of 138 Cain-related stories; during the same period, the publication ran only nine stories about the Solyndra loan-guarantee scandal that has dogged the Obama administration, and just three about the equally contentious Operation Fast and Furious.

“Sadly, Herman Cain’s predictions have come true,” Media Research Center Brent Bozell said in a statement last week. “In May he stated that he was ‘ready for the same high-tech lynching that [Clarence Thomas] went through — for the good of this country.’ That’s what Politico is doing with its unsubstantiated and thoroughly hypocritical hit piece against him.”

Even before the Cain sexual-harassment story, critics accused Politico of sympathizing with liberal causes. In 2009, then-Politico media reporter Michael Calderone wrote that Ben Smith, Mike Allen and Lisa Lerer — all Politico news personnel — participated “with several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics” in the liberal JournoList online discussion forum.

Despite these and other allegations of bias, Politico has continued to insist that its coverage — and that of the mainstream press more generally — is non-ideological and non-partisan.

“Yes, in the closing weeks of this election, John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting hosed in the press, and at Politico,” Politico co-founders John Harris and Jim VandeHei wrote during the 2008 presidential election. “We’d take an educated guess — nothing so scientific as a Pew study — that Obama will win the votes of probably 80 percent or more of journalists covering the 2008 election. … [But] of the factors driving coverage of this election … ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil.”

Politico did not respond on Friday afternoon to The Daily Caller’s questions about its relationship with MSNBC.

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