Another moment of fairness and objectivity brought to you by the media.

Controversial celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg, a self-professed “hard-core Dem,” deliberately took a series of unflattering shots of Republican nominee John McCain for the current cover of The Atlantic - and then bragged about it on a blog.

Greenberg, known for her heavily retouched pics of apes and babies, boasted to Photo District News that she submitted photos of the Arizona senator to the mag while barely airbrushing them.

“I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she boasted.

Greenberg also crowed that she had tricked McCain into standing over a strobe light placed on the floor - turning the septuagenarian’s face into a horror show of shadows.

Asking McCain to “please come over here” for a final shot, Greenberg pretended to be using a standard modeling light.

The resulting photos depict McCain as devilish, with bulging brows and washed-out skin.

I’m all for a free and independent media, and I’m hardly one to advocate for shutting reporters out, but when members of the media behave this way why should Republicans even bother to give them access?  Why do an interview with someone you know will be unfair?  Why pose for pictures with a photographer you know will try to make you look bad?

Far too many media types seem to think that they’re the gatekeepers to the information we get, and that they’re the king makers deciding who will ascend to power and fame and who won’t.  They need to be disabused of that notion, and there’s no time like the present to begin.

America’s system of government was created to keep the government itself from becoming too powerful.  While the results have been mixed (our government grows in size and power by the year), it seems as though a more troubling development in recent years is a partisan media establishment more interested in pursuing political agendas than informing the public.