If you have been paying attention to the news of the election at all this week, you will have noticed that it has been quite a good week for Sen. Obama, and quite a bad week for Sen. McCain from a PR perspective. While Obama has been greeted everywhere he goes on his Middle Eastern and European trip this week with big crowds and great support, Sen. McCain can't quite seem to get his facts straight about much of anything related to his "strongest electoral asset", foreign policy, or to gather more than a dozen or so people to his appearances. To make matters worse for McCain, the scheduled speech he was to give atop an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico this week (you know, to remind us all what a great idea it would be to drill for oil there?) was dramatically cancelled due to the presence of one Hurricane Dolly. This guy can not catch a break!

Still though, there seems to be something fishy thus far in the reporting of this year's Presidential race. Whether it is the predictable accusations from the right of media bias towards Sen. Obama, or the clever editing of Sen. McCain's interview on CBS (part of that "liberal media") to make him seem less of an idiot on foreign policy, or the non-digging into various events from McCain's past that could make for juicy tabloid headlines (akin to the hours of Reverend Wright, Obama as a Muslim and Monica Lewinsky headlines!); there is a clear pattern so far by the television media in this country to prop up an ailing and bumbling John McCain run for the White House.

So why is this propping up being done? Of course there are many conspiratorial reasons one could point to, such as: The media is corporate owned, and as such, has it in their best interest to have a friendlier pro-corporate candidate elected President. The media have long had a love-affair with the "Maverick" John McCain and his BBQ ribs. The mainstream media isn't really all that liberal after all, and in fact, have a demonstrated history of attacking Democratic Presidents and Presidential nominees far more than they do attacking their Republican counterparts. All of these theories hold a certain amount of truth and most likely all combine to slant the media's reporting towards McCain.

I am starting to feel that, in addition to these aspects of the media's reporting, there is another hidden factor at play here. This hidden factor is what I like to call the Horserace Factor. The Horserace Factor is quite simply the media's desire to have this be a close, down to the wire, photo finish election. The reason for this is obvious, and is all about their bottom line. If, on one hand, the race is close, this will increase their viewership from now until election night, and will proportionally increase their ad revenue. If, on the other hand, this race is a blow out and people decide to tune out early, that ad revenue suffers. This same Horserace Factor could be seen on display late in the Democratic Primary where it was a given after a certain point that Obama was going to win. Not having it in their interest to acknowledge this fact, the media kept selling the hype of Clinton's chances of coming back. Every night they could squeeze out of those primary contests, and every "exclusive" poll or vote tally they could report to their viewers equated money in the bank. The reporting of this election so far, and the media's insistence upon helping out the struggling McCain, leads me to believe that this same strategy is, and will continue to be, in play.

Just remember, at the end of the day, the mainstream media (with the exclusion of Fox News, which is, as we all know, a special case) is not beholden to either the left or the right, but rather the money and the share holders.