Politico on Press Bias

"Drudge rules our world" pens a "fair assessment"? In the press organ owned by the chair of the Ronald Reagan Library Board of Trustees?

Thanks, but no thanks.

Moderate this.

For those that would disagree with the assessment, please post here an story that you think has been overlooked by the national media Barack Obama.

Further, I would suggest that in a record twenty month campaign process, if the Republicans could not bring forward a story on Barack Obama and get media attention for it, it's not the media who are to blame.

And that concludes any defense you will find me likely to make about the national media, since it took them so damn long to get off the tire swing in the first place (witness the pathetic "Tire Swing, A Love Story" piece currently up over at Talking Points Memo.)

This discussion has been going on already at Ambers' place:

http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/provocation_of_the_day_the_med.php

I'll repeat what I said there:

The media's not in the tank for Obama.
If they were, there'd be unprompted stories about Alaska Independence party keynote speeches, G. Gordon Liddy, anti-witchcraft religious services, McCain's gambling propensities, voter suppression activities, and the like. Plus demands for media access to McCain & especially Palin.
Instead we get wall-to-wall Ayers, ACORN, and Socialism.

Huh. I STILL can't get moderated, even with by posting a link. Just don't have the knack, I guess.

Anyway, I forgot to add the primary gist from Ambinder's commenters:

McCain's been screwing up. Obama hasn't been. It's not bias to report that with "negative" and "positive" articles, it's TRUTH!!!

McCain is getting hosed in the press because he's lied, faltered and fumbled his way through the last two months.
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Presenting this as 'press bias' is like suggesting there is 'press bias' against a football team on a 16-game losing streak. At the risk of being called sexist, it's not a journalist's job to put lipstick on this particular pig.
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Hmmm. I think the Politico assessment IS a fair one -- and I think it's what happened back in the Dem primary too. When a campaign starts dropping behind, they start floundering, and the press starts to report on said floundering. As Politico says: "As it happens, McCain's campaign is going quite poorly and Obama's is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own." Ambinder made a similar statement in his vlog "Table" thingy with Sullivan.

OK, that one went into moderation (basically I just agreed with Carney & Politico)... Let's try another one, a bit off topic: The LA Times piece written by Maeve someone (referenced by Casey & mocked by TPM) is a thing to behold indeed. I guess you've got to hand it to McCain -- he held a whole bevy of reporters in his sway for a very long time, such that they pine evermore to this day (and even solicit funds?) for a return to their time on the STE -- and this one (Maeve) actually gets sick to her stomach when McCain can't answer a question. There's something really wrong here, but I'm not sure what can be done.

Sorry, Jay. Still not buying. Note in Joe Bftsplk's comment all the stories we would have seen if the media were truly in the tank for Obama.
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The study showing that Obama has run more negative ads, for example, seems to have taken any ad of Obama's that mentions McCain's name as negative and gives it the same weight as a very nasty ad of McCain's. For example, Obama saying that McCain's health policy would include taxing employer benefits would count as negative in the same way as a McCain ad indicating that Obama was BFF with a terrorist who bombed the Pentagon.
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All McCain does is still say bad things about Obama. He cannot say what good things he will do without trashing Obama. OTOH, I've wished some Obama surrogates would be a little more forceful in pointing out the lies and misstatements, but even on the teevee they seem to relentless stick to policy differences.

Aren't you the same guys who claimed that the study showing Obama getting more coverage during the Rev Wright brouhaha proved some sort of bias when the study wasn't taking into consideration that it was largely negative coverage Obama was getting?
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Politico has as much credibility as you do Jay. Which is to say they have no credibility.

Joe...couldn't agree more. Reporting on Obama is more positive because he and his campaign are positive. Reporting on Obama doesn't include criticisms of his gaffs and flip-flops, because he really hasn't had many. To anybody with an open mind Obama has run a consistent, smart, high-level campaign, and McCain hasn't. How could reporting have made it otherwise, without lying?

All this and I must say I intended at the beginning to vote for McCain. I am a Vietnam veteran, too, identified with him and admired his willingness--I thought--to confront the right-wing Republicans when he disagreed. He disabused me of those sentiments by his own actions -- long before the press even began making an issue of it. Not to mention showing himself to lack the mind and character needed for the job.

how about the Republicans and thier voter bias:
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http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/28/virginia-trying-to-combat-misinformation-about-election-day/

"What's more, Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).

You call that balanced?"

There is a tweensy bit more here than meets the eye, Jay. To wit:
Now, say you have a skunk. The skunk, in defending itself, squirts McCain with a good hearty stream of stinkola. Obama, standing next to him, steps back to avoid a similar fate.

Ok. Stage set. Bring in the journalists. Bring in the pundits. Take a poll and see which way the news breaks. Will the study reveal:

A. A nearly 100% bias, with all stating that McCain stinks.
B. A fair and balanced overview in which both McCain and Obama stink.
C. The FOX approach. McCain smells like a rose, and Obama stinks, or, it's all Obama's fault, or, somehow, the skunk, an unnamed reptile, and Obama have had a freindship in the past and the skunk is Wildlife's gift to terrorism.

Me, I'm gonna guess A for the sane, and C for the rest of you out there in GOP land.

sorry forgot about the TROLL:convention (:

That's not a bad article.
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One bad part: "The best evidence of this has been the intense focus on the negative nature of his ads, when it is clear Obama has been similarly negative in spots he airs on radio and in swing states."
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Obama's negative ads are generally lists of McCain's votes and proposals, with footnotes to substantiate their criticism. Whereas McCain is all "Paris Hilton/Bill Ayers/Socialism." All negatives aren't equal.
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As for the Palin shopping spree, a pal of mine was shocked when it got coverage in the media, given how much the media followed the McCain camp's lead on Ayers, lipstick on pigs, Joe the Plumber, etc. But Harris and VandeHei are right-- the press isn't ideological. It just loves peripheral, personality-based, easy-to-report trivia. Generally, that pro-laziness bias favors the GOP, because that party has no rational policy proposals. But sometimes it does not.
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As Slowhand Ted points out, the Miami Dolphins went 1-15 last year because they weren't any good at football, not because reports of their failures appeared in newspapers and on TV. Ditto the McCain-Palin campaign. Heck, just ask a McCain staffer about how the VP pick went. (For purposes of this analogy, Nick Saban = Sarah Palin).

I'm working on a long blog post about balance in this campaign, which will be part of my discussion this Thursday with Jay Rosen at Virtually Speaking this week. There have been two public editor pieces about this in the Sunday Times, one asserting that the number and negativity of the stories about the two campaigns have been balanced at the time. The second, two weeks later, asserted that no, despite all the mail he's getting from right wing people, the coverage has not been biased against McCain.
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My point in this long post is VandeHarris'. If the coverage was indeed been balanced then it has been biased. McCain's campaign has been bad in historic terms. Just last week we had at least 8 incidents that qualifies as campaign disaster. He made a horrible VP pick. He's been unable to find a message, and and been awful in every public forum he's appeared in. He is incoherent in person. The policy positions the campaign has adopted are, at best, sketchy, and change from week to week, sometimes from day to day. There was a crisis in the middle of the race. He mishandled it, badly.
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If the coverage of the McCain campaign and of the candidate's positions have been the same as the Obama campaign, which has to rank with Reagan's 1980 campaign and Bush's 2000 campaign as among the best in the postwar period, is equally negative in tone and coverage, then the coverage has been inaccurate.
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One of the things Calme seems to believe (as Deborah Howell seems to in email correspondence we have had) is that both sides are working the refs, seeking bias their favor, or, at least, the elimination of bias in favor of their opponent. This is not so. The criticism from the left is that the media is less concerned about accuracy than it is about presenting a false equivalency between the two parties. We did not want Obama's cave on FISA covered inaccurately, as a good thing in the party's and the public interest, even though it is Obama's position. The right wing, on the other hand, wants McCain's positions and statements covered positively regardless of their merits, as long as he toes the line (a toeing which is also to be covered positively) on core issues like abortion and immigration. This false equivalence is our beef, not bias.

Its not the medias fault that mcCain isn't exactly a great story generator. If theres nothing good to say about the guy or his campaign - guess what - the medias not going to whip a positive story out of thier @sses. Well - the F-network does it but thats not really news.

CedarFlute, I think that part of the McCain legend willingness--I thought--to confront the right-wing Republicans when he disagreed. has endured beyond all reality. I'm not sure it was ever as real as the press played it up to be. I just heard last night someone say how wonderful McCain was because he reached across the aisle and they mentioned campaign finance reform. Well, how long ago was that? The more recent example of the immigration bill with Kennedy, he took his name off and said he wouldn't vote for it.

As citizens we are all so tired of being bamboozled for the last 8 years. The MSM is partially responsible for perpetrating the false and missleading information and non-transparency of the Bush admin. They tend to hype anything that compells the public into watching, listening and reading. (I vow to never forget the media's incredibly unbalanced coverage of the build up to war in Iraq.) But this time the public is compelled to watch something positive rather than negative, something hopeful rather than fearful. Therefore Obama has been covered more positively.

ivb
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The real problem with the WI Obama as negative study was that it counted raw numbers of ads. Since Obama is running many more ads, he is necessarily running more negative ads. And, yes, the McCain ads are qualitatively more negative and less accurate.
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And, as Dirks pointed out, that bit of study was a make good for a previous study from the same people saying that McCain was running a much more negative campaign.
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False equivalence was demanded from the McCain people at the time.
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It's hard to know what put my last post into limbo.

Another example is the endless nonsense about Joe the Plumber, now ramped up with McCain lies. If the press were truly in the tank for Obama, someone would have pushed the entire video of the Obama encounter with him which is very different from the phrase.

Oh, and also, this from the article is completely foolish: "But he has benefited from the idea that negative attacks that in a normal campaign would be commonplace in this year would carry an out-of-bounds racial subtext. That's why Obama's long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was basically a nonissue in the general election."
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Um, hello people. Remember March? When that was the single thing the media reported on all month long? It's old news now, so no one's talking about it (kinda like the much more recent, much more relevant, finding that Gov. Palin abused her office and broke state ethics laws).
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Also, that might be the single, solitary thing that McCain can claim he didn't do, if someday he comes back asking for people to act like he has integrity. He called Obama a socialist, implied that he might be a terrorist, lumped him in with overheated accusations toward ACORN to stoke white fear of black people voting, but, AFAIK, he refrained from attacking Rev. Wright. I doubt it's because of his own crazy pastor problem-- GOP slimesters like Schmidt have never been deterred by the glass houses problem in the past.

Is "Obama is a t e r r o r i s t" equivalent to "McCains' tax cuts favor the wealthy." No way, in my book.

Just to pile on a little: no doubt stories mentioning Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 were overwhelmingly negative. That doesn't prove bias in the least. Nor does any count of positive/negative stories, unless you are willing to make unfounded a priori claims about the underlying events (i.e., that Obama and McCain "objectively warranted" equally positive coverage).

Pork chop sandwich.