The verdict is coming in from Us magazine subscribers about its Sarah Palin cover and it’s not looking good. Folks have been calling in to cancel their subscriptions to the tune of as few as 3,000 and as many as 10,000. At least one advertiser is reported to be feeling a lot of heat over the cover as well and the magazine may lose that company’s business.

The really bad news for Us is that the magazine doesn’t actually hit subscribers’ mailboxes until Friday.

So why did they do it? It’s a bit hackneyed to fall back on the excuse of media bias, but in this case, it’s precisely the reason.

“When Us went to print Monday night, it looked like the ticket was falling apart,” says one magazine editor. “They went to print thinking Palin was dead in the water, and their mistake was thinking everyone who reads Us is a Democrat, when they’re not…”

That wasn’t their only mistake, but it was the obvious one. Republicans like their gossip rags and tabloids just as much as Democrats. Before it went out of print, I was a fan of the Weekly World News (who could resist a story headlined “Sarah Palien”, complete with side-by-side photos of Palin and an alien?). The arrogance here is that Jann Wenner decided to use his magazine to push his pwon partisan point of view and now the people who work for him are the ones doing the suffering. Which strikes me as typically progressive of him.

The real bias in the story, though, is in the assumption that the ticket was falling apart. The only people who thought the ticket was falling apart were Obama faithful, including leftist political pundits and a few MSM outlets. No serious journalist gave the story any credibility and the folks who watched McCain’s campaign the closest were laughing at the very idea. The stories were rumors that had no basis in fact and outside the left-wing echo chamber, no one was taking them seriously. The editors at Us never bothered to look outside their little bubble and there certainly wasn’t anyone on the inside that could have set them straight.

When I talk about media bias, this is exactly what I mean. If there had been just one marginally-conservative person on the editorial board of Us magazine, that cover would never have gone to press and the notion that the ticket was falling apart would have been debunked for the nonsense it is.

(via Warner Todd Huston)

UPDATE: Oh holy crap. In the same issue, not two pages after the Palin smear article, there’s an entire story on how “chic” Michelle Obama is.