Standing on a Toronto corner last summer waiting for Stephen Harper to put in an appearance, Peter Kent entertained journalists with a lengthy dissertation on media bias. Weary of Conservatives' difficulty in "getting past the filter of liberal media apologists," the news-anchor-turned-Tory-candidate announced that he was calling on journalism schools to monitor the coming election.

I'm not sure if any of the journalism professors Kent petitioned to conduct such research took him up on his challenge. But a political science department was already doing it - and the results weren't exactly what he had in mind.

As it did in the 2004 election, McGill University's Observatory on Media and Public Policy (OMPP) recently monitored campaign coverage in seven newspapers - The Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald, La Presse and Le Devoir - for a variety of phenomena, including the tone struck toward each party. This was probably a narrower sample size than Kent had in mind. But considering it included the Star and the Globe - two of the great bogeymen of liberal bias - he probably would have expected it to prove his point.

But if anyone had received harsh coverage from the dailies, the researchers reported, it was the Liberals. Mostly, they found coverage to be neutral - especially when it came to news reports. But when editorials and op-eds were factored in, only 1% of Liberal mentions were "positive" - next to 15% that were "negative."

No other party came anywhere close to that poor a showing. But only the Conservatives pulled even on the positive/negative split, with 5% on either side.

If anything, the OMPP may not have fully captured the degree to which the Liberals were cast in a negative light. What the researchers didn't measure were more subtle factors like photo selection - and if you looked at the images of Paul Martin in this campaign, you know just how unattractive he was often made to look.

None of this is to say the Liberals didn't deserve to lose. They ran an awful campaign, and the coverage was mostly a reflection of that. But when they complain that bias hurt them, the Martinites might actually have a point.

The thing is, though, it wasn't anti-Liberal or pro-Conservative bias that helped do Martin in - it was journalists' well-established bias toward the easy narrative.

If there's anything to fault the media for, it's not liberal or conservative leanings - it's the pack mentality. If the received wisdom is that a party is running a bad campaign, every minor gaffe will be jumped on as proof. When the pack smells blood, it's relentless.

When Stockwell Day was torn from limb to limb in the 2000 campaign, and subsequently as he tried to keep hold of the Canadian Alliance, it wasn't because every journalist in the country was unable to square with his social conservatism. It was because, with early gaffes and his caucus turning against him, Day made an easy target. And once the storyline was that he was beyond hope, it was far easier and more fun to go along with it than to confuse things.

In 2004, it worked both ways. It's easy to forget now, but for the first three weeks of that campaign, Martin could do no right and Harper could do no wrong. Then, just as the Liberals moderately got their act together, the Conservatives suffered through an array of horrible blunders - from press releases accusing Martin of supporting child porn to Randy White's anti-Charter interview. And confronted with a new narrative - the Tories blowing their shot at power - the media did a 180 in the last two weeks. Cumulatively, the OMPP found that both parties had been cast in a negative light by newspapers in 2004, the Liberals still more so than the Tories.

This time around, the narrative was consistent throughout. With the Liberals coming apart at the seams, every Grit gaffe was magnified beyond where it would have been in past campaigns. And since the Tories' discipline and impeccable campaign strategy established off the bat that they were no longer a bunch of hopeless rubes, missteps that would have been front-page news last time were relegated to the back pages.

Take Carl Defaria. In the campaign's final week, the Conservative candidate and former Ontario Cabinet minister was accused of distributing a leaflet claiming the Liberals planned to "legalize crack houses," promote gay marriage in kindergarten and lower the age of consent to 12. It also accused them of having "taken the Bible out of the school system." When Defaria was confronted by reporters at one of Harper's Toronto-area events, he was hustled into an elevator without offering any defence.

In 2000 or 2004, Defaria would have become a household name nationwide. But this time, it didn't fit the narrative. So even in the Star, the incident didn't get its own news story.

After the fact, the losers always complain about the media being out to get them. But it's invariably happened because they positioned themselves as losers in the first place - as the Liberals did this time by letting the Tories take the campaign to them for weeks on end. Once the storyline is in place, twists are hard to come by.