Liberal media bias? What liberal media bias?

As Jim Rutenberg reported Thursday:

[W]hen Senator Barack Obama heads for Iraq and other places overseas this summer, [Brian] Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two network evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Mr. Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Mr. Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Mr. Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seatmates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Mr. Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. A “Meet the Press” interview is also being planned.

The extraordinary coverage planned for Mr. Obama’s trip, though in part solicited by aides, reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first black presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season. […]

The imbalance has appeared in various analyses of the news coverage. The Tyndall Report, a news coverage monitoring service that has the broadcast networks as clients, reports that the three newscasts by the networks — which have a combined audience of more than 20 million people — spent roughly 114 minutes covering Mr. Obama since June. They spent about 48 minutes covering Mr. McCain, who made the rounds of the evening newscasts in satellite interviews last week.

Jay:

The extraordinary coverage of Obama’s trip reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first African-American presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

Ed Morrissey:

So the news media can’t even claim novelty when explaining this effort.  When was the last time we saw any network anchor doing a remote, let alone all three at the same time?  Not even the Iraq War merited it after the first elections in 2004-5, and I don’t believe that involved all three anchors at any time.  Afghanistan hasn’t merited it. This is nothing more than the media fawning over Obama, and looking to give him as much earned media as they can.  Their pretense of objective reporting has been ripped away, and the media looks like little more than groupies vying for the attention of a pop star, hoping that some of his popularity rubs off on them.  This should embarrass journalists, but instead they’re busy rationalizing their utter lack of self-respect.

The Anchoress:

You do realize, don’t you, that if a GOP candidate with weak foreign policy was doing the same thing - making a “world tour” with dramatic backdrops - the press would be sneering about how the whole thing is a “stunt” meant to “deflect his inexperience.” I know you know it, but I had to say it, anyway.

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