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Some say that the media have fallen hard for Barack Obama. Others note that journalists once carried a torch for John McCain and may well do so again. Watch the coverage closely, however, and it turns out that the most powerful media bias in this campaign is not for a person but for a decade.

The 1960s are alive all over again in the Baby Boomer-run media, as reporters and pundits try to make sense of this political moment by returning repeatedly to a moment four decades old. The'60s fetish has been with us for a long time and was a motif of the 2004 presidential campaign. But it's back now in a new and more powerful way, thanks in part to the rise of Obama.

President Bush, John Kerry, Al Gore, and the Clintons all came of age in the Day-Glo decade, but Obama was just a child during those years. Still, because he reminds the '60s generation of their youth, and overtly plays to those memories in his speeches, Obama has become a kind of ideal embodiment of the era, a blank slate onto which news outlets can project all of the glory and horror of that long-ago time.

Earlier this week, The New York Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold story about the fear, among voters of a certain age, that Obama might be assassinated. Headlined "In Memories of a Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama," the story noted near the top that when people raise these concerns with Obama, he tells them to "stop worrying."

"Yet worry they do," The Times continued, "with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months. Mr. Obama was 6 at the time, and like many of his admirers, he has only read about the violence that traumatized the nation. But those recollections and images are often invoked by older voters, who watch his candidacy with fascination, as well as an uneasy air of apprehension."

This is a real phenomenon. Many who lived through the '60s have had these thoughts about Obama. But beyond this free-floating anxiety, there isn't much to say, and the story was a thin read, interesting less as news than as cultural marker.

As the melodramatic "hushed" in the headline and the creepy Dallas dateline suggested, the story's real purpose was emotional. It was framing Obama's candidacy through the particular experience of one generation. Toward the end, the paper quoted assassination expert Gerald Posner on Obama: "He represents so much hope and change. That is exactly what was taken away from us in the 1960s."

This has been happening for months and will likely continue through November. Sometimes the '60s lens is highly relevant: Obama's rhetoric unquestionably owes a lot to King. And sometimes the echoes are a bit absurd. A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of media interest in a professor named William Ayers, a former member of the radical Weather Underground (technically an early-'70s collective, but in spirit a '60s hangover), who once served on the board of an anti-poverty group with Obama and donated $200 to his campaign. Had Ayers been a 98-year-old former anarchist from the 1930s who wrote a check to the Obama campaign for the same amount, I guarantee that we would have never heard about him. Wrong decade.

If the race turns out to be Obama versus McCain, the obsession will only grow. Where Obama represents the RFK/MLK side of '60s culture, McCain, the former Vietnam POW, will become the embodiment of the anti-communist, warrior strain. America's Boomercentric newsrooms will churn out endless stories about the great dichotomy that supposedly lives on today. But does it really? The present is messy and complicated, hard to make sense of. Why not Google the world of 40 years ago and say it's all a rerun?

If the news outlets of the early '60s had been this backward-looking, JFK's candidacy would have been all about the 1920s. "Gosh, doesn't that young Kennedy fellow remind you of flappers, the Lost Generation, and Warren Harding?" But then, that would have been silly.