Throughout the 2008 campaign season, I kept careful tally of readers&#8217; impressions of bias in <em>The Kansas City Star&#8217;s </em>election news. The response was almost universal: The paper was pro-Barack Obama, anti-John McCain.</p><p>Specifics, then, I asked. Can you point me to news stories with loaded language, unfair focus or other concrete examples of favoring one candidate? The replies were few. Some pointed to an Oct. 14 story about a Sarah Palin rally, which led with the vice presidential candidate&#8217;s mistaking cheers from the back of the crowd for hecklers. Several readers saw that as a gratuitous knock, and I agree fully. It was a cheap shot, suitable for &#8220;The Daily Show&#8221; and not a mainstream newspaper.</p><p>Others pointed primarily to sins of omission, thinking the paper should have focused more on Obama&#8217;s connections with several figures in his past, primarily former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and political fundraiser Antoin &#8220;Tony&#8221; Rezko, who was convicted on multiple counts of fraud, money laundering and bribery in June. Here, the argument is much murkier.</p><p>Down the road , journalists may wish that they&#8217;d looked at Obama&#8217;s background more closely. On the other hand, these relationships have been mentioned dozens of times throughout the paper &#8212; and many sordid details repeated as gospel on the Internet don&#8217;t stand up to scrutiny.</p><p>Why, then, the overwhelming number of complaints that <em>The Star </em>was systematically biased towards Obama, if few readers could point to particular problematic news stories? I&#8217;ll let a self-identified Democrat do the heavy lifting:</p><p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t imagine a vote for a Republican in a million years, but Democrats are supposed to stand up for everyone&#8217;s right to be heard, (and) I&#8217;m almost embarrassed by <em>The Star</em>,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;When I read your paper, not just the Opinion section, it&#8217;s pretty hard for me to argue with my mother when she says it&#8217;s unfair. &#8216;The Buzz&#8217; is all over McCain, and it&#8217;s the same with columns in the (Local) section, in the comics, and even Jason Whitlock in Sports calls Obama &#8216;change we can believe in.&#8217; I have to tell my mother she&#8217;s right sometimes.&#8221;</p><p>This is the key. I believe <em>The Star </em>has roundly failed to give readers a fair variety of commentary throughout the paper.</p><p>With a few minor exceptions, I found news coverage of the election to be almost painstakingly equitable, sometimes even down to bringing up both candidates in stories that didn&#8217;t really require it. I also think the lineup of syndicated columns and cartoonists in the Opinion section has been generally evenhanded.</p><p>And while there was a bit of chicken-and-egg, especially in the final weeks as Obama&#8217;s campaign sailed along smoothly while McCain&#8217;s suffered internal bickering and lurching messages, there&#8217;s no question that the pundit class, including those in &#8220;The Buzz&#8221; on Page A-2, gave disproportionate lumps to the GOP.</p><p>Some of the imbalance is largely the result of eight years under an increasingly unpopular Republican president. Of course, it&#8217;s also worth noting that part of McCain&#8217;s strategy was to decry the foregone conclusion of a biased press corps.</p><p>But as I&#8217;ve said many times, readers form their impressions of fairness cumulatively and over time. I fully grasp why conservatives feel <em>The Star&#8217;s </em>deck was stacked against them.