The press and the public are worlds apart.(Forward Observer)

The headline on my copy of a touted new survey by the Pew Research Center read, "Press Going Too Easy on Bush."

Now there's a story!

It was late May, and the media had spent the past three months celebrating vicious antagonists of the administration like Richard Clarke, trashing not only George Bush himself but also practically all of his policies and key advisors: Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz. It was odd, I thought, that under these circumstances the public would think the press was going easy on the President.

Then I read the report.

The opiners described in that headline weren't average Americans. They were members of the press corps itself. The Pew study found that 55 percent of national journalists believed that "press treatment of Bush was not critical enough." Only 8 percent thought it was "too critical."

The public, however, had the opposite view: 24 percent thought the press was going too easy on Bush; 34 said it was too tough.

The press and the public remain, in the words of the Media Research Center, "worlds apart."