Media Bias “More Intense In The 2008 Election Than In Any Other National Campaign In Recent History”
And what’s even worse is that, according to Time’s Mark Halperin, the last time the media was this biased was just a year or so ago when the outcome of the Iraq war was still in doubt.
Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.
“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”
Halperin, who maintains Time’s political site “The Page,” cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.
“The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” Halperin said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”
The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is,” according to Halperin.
The lame defense of this bias from Halperin’s colleagues? The media was biased in favor of Obama because Obama is so awesome and McCain was so lame.
New York magazine’s John Heilemann, one of Halperin’s co-panelists, offered another reason for all the positive press coverage Obama received.
“The biggest bias in the press is towards effectiveness,” said Heilemann, who is authoring a book on the 2008 race along with Halperin.
“We love things that are smart.”
Because Obama’s campaign was generally so well run, he argued, the press tended to applaud even his negative tactics.
“We’ll scold you for being negative,” Heilemann said, “but if it seems to be working, the tone of your coverage becomes more positive.”
Yeah, but I wonder how they gauge what is and is not effective? I mean, of course Obama’s attacks on McCain are going to be more convincing for the press. The vast majority of the media is liberal. By default they’re going to like what a fellow liberal like Obama is going to say more than someone who is not-as-liberal (I refuse to refer to him as a conservative) like McCain.
With the press corps covering any given story or event tends to be ideologically homogeneous it’s not going to be very surprising when a palpable bias emerges from their coverage.
What’s encouraging is that people like Halperin are at least talking about this stuff now. Just a few years ago such admissions from working journalists were pretty much unheard of. That’s progress, even if the bias in the media seems to be getting worse.
