Dear Project For Excellence in Journalism: please just stop. Stop doing these studies or just stop releasing your so-called "empirical" findings to the press. Because Howard Kurtz "reporting" that the press is so mean to John McCain and so nice to Barack Obama all the time is not "excellent journalism." It is more like "the Project for No Context and More Bullshit in Journalism." Christ, PEJ, how does it further excellent journalism, learning this factoid:

The most negative element of the Palin coverage involved scrutiny of her record as Alaska governor, with 64 percent of the stories carrying a negative tone and just 7 percent positive. The coverage of her interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson was a wash, but stories about her subsequent sitdown with CBS's Katie Couric were 57 percent negative and 14 percent positive.

Are journalists actually supposed to write one nice story about how totally pretty Governor Palin is for every piece they file on how she's a petty tinpot PTA mom-from-hell who somehow manages to abuse what little power the governor of Alaska actually has? What purpose does this study serve, Project for Excellence in Journalism, except to encourage John McCain to think it's not fair and it's not his fault and everyone was mean to him?

Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.