Shouting Media Bias in a Crowded Casino

Say, look who’s playing the media bias card all of a sudden:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) accused the media on Thursday evening of being “easy” on his Republican challenger, Sharron Angle.

Reid accused Angle of speaking in “code words” in reference to some of her positions on entitlement programs like Social Security, and jabbed at the media for not fully probing her views.

“Never have I run against someone who speaks in code words that are not explainable,” Reid said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And I have to say, the press has given her a pretty easy go.”

Reid — who has skated by for years while journalists looked the other way at his penchant for clanging and at times racialist malapropisms — is suddenly complaining about media bias on the eve of the election? It’s Deja McCain all over again — or as his more ebullient cousin wrote in his pre-postmortem in early October of 2008:

I didn’t comment on it at the time, but I was shocked when Steve Schmidt lashed out at the New York Times on Sept. 22. Every word Schmidt said about the NYT being in the tank for Obama was true. But you don’t do that. Ever. Not in a campaign you have any hope of winning. It is one thing to criticize specific errors by specific reporters, but for a presidential campaign manager to call into question the fundamental integrity of a newspaper that more or less dictates news coverage at the three major broadcast networks? Uh uh. No way. Leave that work to surrogates. Then Wednesday, in an interview with the Associated Press, McCain himself got all hostile with the reporter. That is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

On the other hand, Harry can’t complain about this media titan supporting him:

The National Football League’s political action committee—Gridiron PAC—has weighed in on the hotly contested U.S. Senate election in Nevada that pits conservative Republican challenger Sharron Angle against Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.The PAC has given $10,000 to Reid—the maximum it can give in a single election cycle—and no money to Angle, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by OpenSecrets.org.

Despite all that, Angle is ahead in this poll as we head into the weekend, and Reid’s frustration, as evidenced by a media darling lashing out at his base of palace guard journalists, is palpable.

Update: This election is still well within the margin of ACORN, though.

Update: Or is it? Get a load of the polling trendline in this graphic.