Declaring Themselves Innocent: Reuters Article Says There Was Little Media Bias In Election Coverage
Right. And I’m on Obama’s short list to be Secretary of Defense.
...media scholars, including a former top aide to McCain, disagree. They said campaign coverage often did lean in Obama’s favor, though not—as many conservatives have suggested—because of a hidden liberal agenda on the part of the media.
Instead, academic experts said, Obama benefited largely from the dynamics of the campaign itself and the media’s tendency to focus on the “horse race,” emphasizing ups and downs in the polls and political tactics.
As Obama’s poll numbers rose in response to events, so did favorable press coverage for him, not the other way round.
“Winning begets winning coverage,” said Mark Jurkowitz, an author of a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that tracked campaign coverage.
Basically, what they’re saying is that election reporting was slanted toward Obama because McCain is a loser. Now, being someone who thinks McCain was a terrible candidate and never should have the GOP’s candidate, I’m not necessarily in a position to disagree. But that doesn’t really get at the heart of this now, does it?
Consider, for instance, that Sarah Palin was on McCain’s ticket for all of 48 hours before the media had already run stories about her daughter’s pregnancy, the possibility that Sarah might have faked her pregnancy with Trig to hide her daughter’s previous pregnancy and her daughter’s boyfriends fishing infractions. Yet it took the media two years to discover that Barack Obama’s auntie - who he lovingly described in one of his bestselling books - was living in America illegally and had given him illegal campaign contributions.
Fair? Not even a little bit.
I can rattle off a list of pro-Obama bias right off the top of my head:
An AP reporter saying that it’s “cool to be American again” after Obama’s win.
Chris Matthews saying that it’s his job to make sure Obama is successful as President.
The New York Times refusing to run McCain’s op/ed on Iraq despite having just run Obama’s.
The media, as a whole, refusing to cover the war in Iraq in any meaningful way now that we’ve won because it would illustrate how wrong Obama was on the war and how right McCain was.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Was McCain a bad candidate? Yes. Did he garner a lot of negative media attention because of that? Yes. But that still doesn’t excuse the fawning, completely incurious and sometimes outright propagandizing treatment Obama got.
And besides, why should we believe articles about media bias written by the very people who are biased to begin with?
