During the 2000 and 2004 elections, the liberal online newsmagazine Salon.com was a refuge for Democrats seeking sanity amidst a political nightmare. But with Barack Obama's February 2007 announcement of his run for the presidency, Salon has shifted direction, moving away from "journalism" and becoming what seems to be a covert arm of the Clinton smear campaign against Obama.

They got on the bandwagon early. For example, Salon announced Obama's candidacy with a headline article titled "Barack Obama and the Springfield race riot." Seriously --  history's in the making, and Salon's front page for several days highlights an article about Springfield's 100 year old race riots, asking what announcing there "could mean for Obama."  The author, Edward McClelland, has since regularly dropped in at Salon to launch hits on Obama, including this recent contribution: "The Crazy Uncles in Obama's Attic."

Salon also was one of the early proponents of the "Obama's not black enough" theme, publishing Debra Dickerson's controversial "Colorblind." In the article, Dickerson said "Barack Obama would be the great black hope in the next presidential race -- if he were actually black." Dickerson actually called Obama "a non-black on the down low about his non-blackness."

Salon's blog about the war and politics, War Room, has so many anti-Obama blog posts, there's not even space to list them all. And Walter Shapiro, Salon's Washington Bureau Chief, rarely strays from Clinton party line, and recently ran a campaign ad disguised as a "news" article: "She's not as bad as you think."

So what does Salon's editor, Joan Walsh, have to say about all this?  Interestingly, Walsh, herself the most frequent offender in Salon's anti-Obama, pro-Hillary crusade, recently wrote:

"I am very proud of Salon's coverage of the Democratic primary. We are not pulling for any candidate, or trying to correct for any impression that we're pulling for any candidate. We're reporting the news fairly, and in our opinion columns, we're asking and trying to answer compelling questions other people aren't tackling. When we all look back in 2009, I think Salon will stand out for its fairness, especially when one looks at primary coverage on the Web."

This is the same Joan Walsh who last week wrote "Will Obama's debate stumble hurt him?" saying: "Clearly nasty Clinton supporters...don't get under my skin as much as the nasty Obama zealots (aside from the reason that's obvious to the nasty Obama zealots, which is that I support Clinton!)"

Along the way, Walsh has regularly criticized Obama and promoted Clinton. A scan through the headlines of the last year of Walsh's blog posts -- much less the actual content -- pretty much says it all. 

So what's the problem? It's certainly not wrong for a media outlet to endorse a candidate. But the problem is Salon's refusal to come out of the Clinton closet and just endorse their favored candidate. Instead, they continue to claim they are "reporting the news fairly" while offering skewed and biased campaign coverage and opinion that unfairly favors Hillary Clinton.

A news media outlet calling itself "fair and balanced" while presented biased coverage -- it seems we've heard that one before, haven't we?

Madame De Stael is the founder of Salon: The Parody -- http://salonparody.blogspot.com -- a blog/website that takes aim at Salon.com's biased campaign coverage.