Do you work in the U.S. national news media. Do you dislike being bashed? Too bad. Get used to it. Fortunately, most journos already are conditioned.

The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson draws the following links between the Obama/Wright controversy and coverage of Sarah Palin's various personal and professional pecadilloes:

The media frenzy surrounding Ms. Palin has been extreme, though no more than that which accompanied the imbroglio over Mr. Obama's association with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

It is the product of a disturbing shift in how the media cover presidential elections. The proliferation of bloggers, Web-based journals and online videos drives the agenda. They broke the Wright affair, the controversy over Mr. Obama's "bitter voters" remarks, and churned the rumours over the pregnancy of Ms. Palin's unwed teenage daughter.

These revelations, invariably accompanied by accusations, commentary and false rumours, are picked up by the cable news networks, and then repeated in newspapers "now that it's out there."

The overall calibre of commentary declines, for which all of us in this craft are responsible.

From CTV.ca:

The Green Party of Canada will go to court if necessary to persuade Canada's broadcast consortium to include leader Elizabeth May in the televised leaders' debates for the federal election due to be called on Sunday.

At the request of the Tyee, B.C. j-prof Crawford Killian has developed a list of blogs to watch for with respects to election commentary both here and in the United States.

What, no mention of Daily Kos? Or firedoglake? Or Instapundit?

In Canada, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor deserves a mention by name as a conduit for the PMO. :)

Liberal Jason Cherniak -- who, as everyone knows, is "as influential as the mainstream media" -- is an enthusiastic Dion booster. Calgary Grit, who blogs from the other centre of the universe, is another Liberal name worth checking out.

Robert McClelland has been a hardnosed, partisan supporter of the NDP.

Killian had a problem finding "green boogers." Here's one -- the inimitable JimBobby.

Scott Tribe blogs from a "progressive" perspective and is usually worth a read. POGGE is a collective progressive blog.

Revolutionary Moderation had one of my favourite features from the 2005-06 campaign -- The Gaffe-O-Meter! He's geared up to go this fall!

On the MSM side, I like Paul Wells. I liked Andrew Coyne's blog more when he was a National Post columnist (his personal blog hasn't been updated since May).

Ace Toronto Star reporter Linda Diebel does political blogging ("The Decoder") for the paper's website. But she only posts once per day (if that) and her blog is hard to find if you don't have it bookmarked.

Globeandmail.com makes it somewhat easier to find blog postings than TheStar.com. But here's a bizarre defect. In the right-hand column, there's a section called Insights with 'commentary' and 'latest blog posts' tabs. At the bottom is a link called See all commentary, which takes you to the 'opinions' page. However, you won't find one globeandmail.com blog link there.

Globeandmail.com does have two decent national politics blogs -- Adam Radwanski's and Dan Cook's Blogolitics. But both are on the national homepage. Reporter Siri Agrell has been doing some blogging from the U.S. Democratic and Republican conventions and it seems like she'll be keeping the blog ("Stumped") going throughout the political season.

If you have any suggestions of your own, have your people call my people.

I'm especially interested in learning the identities of the covert contributors to CBC.ca's Political Bytes blog. :)

From AP via TheStar.com:

John McCain's campaign Wednesday angrily called for an end to questions about its review of Sarah Palin's background, deriding a "faux media scandal designed to destroy the first female Republican nominee" for vice-president.