Anyone who says the media are biased is always confronted by this argument. They say that if there is no plot, there is no bias, or that what bias there is doesn't matter. That is not the way bias really works. The fact is that bias can distort everything hopelessly without anything like a plot involved. If judges and reporters believe that one side is good and the other is evil, it affects what they see as objective truth.
People tend to believe what they want to believe.
In this case, the working media believe almost unanimously that the left is based on Love and the right is based on Hate. As a result of their almost unanimous bias, reporters deeply believe in what liberals say, and are deeply suspicious of anything the right says. So on election night, if Gore won a state, they believed that immediately. But in states where Bush led, they kept in mind every single reservation that their good guys, the Democrats, had expressed about Bush carrying that state. So they reported the first and delayed the second.