Liberal mainstream media bias for Hillary Clinton is the single biggest factor so far in this election season contributing to her lead in the polls. The nightly news on NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post, the morning and late-night TV shows, CNN, MSNBC, and all the websites associated with these sources are strongly and openly behind Hillary and her “first woman” status. Many so-called journalists have dropped any pretense of objectivity and are quite unashamedly and openly supportive of Clinton, while they derisively dismiss Trump as an unserious nonentity. Ostensibly, it is Trump’s presence in this year’s race that has caused liberal bias to be so prominent, but no rational observer could possibly think that the media would show any less favoritism towards First-Woman Hillary if her Republican opponent were Cruz, Rubio, or Kasich.

Hillary has many well-known vulnerabilities and character flaws: her role in Benghazi debacle and the subsequent rewriting of history in order to avoid accountability and blame, her nonaccomplishments in every major foreign affairs arena where she played a role as Secretary of State, her private e-mail server and her continual distortions and parsing in an attempt to deflect scrutiny and shift responsibility (“Colin Powell told me to do it!”), and of course, the widening-by-the-day Clinton Foundation corruption controversy.

These factors are completely independent of who her opponent happens to be. They would all still exist whether she was running against Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, or Yogi Berra. The liberal media cover these stories as minimally as possible: just barely enough to be able to say, “See? We’re covering it, we’re doing our job,” but nowhere near vigorously and aggressively enough to do any actual damage to Clinton’s campaign. If a Republican candidate had the same deep-seated weaknesses as Hillary, the liberal media would have hounded them out of the race long ago.

That the mainstream media is liberally biased is not in question. The major mainstream newsrooms -- continually fed with an unending stream of liberally-oriented reporters from liberal journalism schools like Columbia, Harvard, BU, etc. -- are veritable echo chambers of down-the-line liberalthink, resulting in a self-perpetuating condition of liberally-biased reporting.

Exacerbating the situation is the imperious manner in which liberal reporters conduct their recklessly biased reporting, justifiably confident that no negative repercussions or criticism will ever redound to their personal detriment. Some call this the “puppy dog and magazine effect”: a puppy will continually soil the carpet until it realizes there is a penalty (in the form of a rolled-up magazine across the snoot) for certain bad behaviors. When the puppy associates the punishment with a particular behavior, the behavior either stops or changes.

The liberal media act freely because there is no threat of penalty.

Absent a “magazine” coming from Republican candidates, why would any agenda-driven liberal reporter ever change his behavior? He wouldn’t, and he doesn’t.

So far, the only thing Republicans have been able to do is point out liberal bias after the fact, once it has already occurred. In this they have been reasonably successful, since more of the attentive electorate (an admittedly small slice of the total electorate) is now at least somewhat aware that the mainstream media favors the Democrats. But pointing out liberal bias after it has already taken place does nothing to prevent its opinion-shaping effects on the casually-attentive bloc of voters, a bloc that plays a huge role in determining the outcome in every election. Waiting until the damage has already taken place and then reporting on it is akin to letting the puppy go on the carpet and then saying to someone else, “That’s a bad puppy.” Until and unless an effective strategy/procedure is developed that will stop liberal media bias before it happens, nothing will change.

It’s up to the individual Republican candidates to take on the challenge of developing those pre-emptive tactics, since they have no support or instruction from the national Republican party, because the national party either has no clue how (most likely) or they’re too afraid to rock the boat. Plus, there are no conservative counterparts to James Carville, a liberal operative who scours the media every day, looking for opportunities to attack and make dramatic, unforgettable impressions on casually-attentive voters. When 90% of the media is against you, you'd better take some pre-emptive action. Republicans don't and the results show it. That’s the job of the candidates’ communications "experts," who are obviously missing in action.

The demographics of the country are swinging permanently against the Republicans. America will be a ‘majority minority’ country very soon, with an ever-increasing share of the population receiving government entitlements. No one ever votes to end their own entitlements. If the Republicans don't win in 2016, it'll be that much harder in 2020 and increasingly more difficult after that. The "circular firing squad" that Republicans have created this year because of Trump -- who won the primaries fair and square, regardless of anyone's personal feelings about him -- is truly idiotic and inexplicable.

The Republicans need to remember who their real opponent is in 2016 -- it’s not the “untraditional Republican” Donald Trump, it’s the liberal media propping up an astonishingly deficient Hillary Clinton. The Republicans had better find that magazine quickly if they hope to win this November.