Editor’s Note: Anyone who has read a women’s magazine in the last 25 years has most likely read the work of Myrna Blyth, who weighs in at wowOwow with this provocative piece. Myrna is the founding editor of More magazine, was the longtime editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal, and was senior editor for Family Circle magazine. She is the chairman of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. She has received many awards including the Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications, Inc., the Woman of Achievement Award from the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, and was named Publishing Executive of the Year by Advertising Age. Currently she writes for The National Review Online and is the editor-in-chief of Betty Confidential.

Bernie Goldberg is the guy who really blew the whistle on media bias.

His first book, the aptly-named Bias, published in 2001, became a much-discussed No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Bias got a boost from George W. Bush, who, soon after publication, carried a copy out of the White House and flashed it in the face of the White House press corp. In that book, Goldberg, a six-time CBS Emmy-winning TV reporter, described the liberal leanings of his Black Rock colleagues, including Dan Rather, and how their politics influenced the way they report the news.

Now a commentator on, yes, Fox, and a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports, Goldberg’s newest work is a sort-of love story, called A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. (Why oh why are conservative writers so much funnier than their liberal counterparts?) Goldberg details the one-sided coverage of the presidential campaign, which, he believes, morphed from even just a semblance of balanced reporting into a major media man-crush on Barack Obama.

“This time it was different,” he told me. “It went beyond mere bias. During this campaign, the media crossed the line. They became activists. They were on a noble mission to help elect the first black president. They didn’t want to be witnesses. They wanted to help make history. They de facto enlisted in the Obama campaign.”

Goldberg describes case after case of partisan reporting from The New York Times’s one-sided battering of John McCain and even Cindy McCain, to the media’s outcry when George Stephanopoulos dared to ask Obama about his relationship to terrorist Bill Ayres, to Chris Matthews’s “I feel this thrill go up my leg” drool over Obama’s victory speech.

“Chris Matthews,” he writes, “is a journalist hooker putting out for Obama from the moment the senator showed some leg.”

He also describes the “Palin Derangement Syndrome," — similar to the “Bush Derangement Syndrome, a mental illness that struck millions of liberals … and left them foaming at the mouth at the mention of the president’s name.” Palin drove many in the liberal media crazy because “this pro-life, pro-gun, churchgoing woman … wasn’t one of them.” He also points out that the press kept telling us, over and over, that if Obama lost, it could only be because of racism. Yet the same reporters and commentators never expressed that concern when politicians such as Ken Blackwell or Michael Steele or Lynn Swann, all conservative black men, lost recent races. That’s because “liberals don’t really see conservative black men as black — anymore than they see conservative women as women. They see them only as conservatives. So they don’t really count."

Goldberg says he also recognizes the historic importance of Obama’s election and that his book is not anti-Obama. It is anti-media. “I don’t buy into his politics but I think he speaks eloquently. He comes off as smart. He’s cool, which is important in the United States of Entertainment. He seems a genuinely nice guy. But I don’t really know this person. The major media was supposed to find out a lot more about him during the campaign. It was their responsibility and they didn’t do it. They were cheerleaders.”