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PrintNovember 1, 2008
Surprise! Study shows McCain getting the shaft from the press
Pew Research has come out with a study on media coverage of the election and not surprisingly, it reveals that John McCain has received an unbelievable amount of negative coverage:
The numbers show that the press has indeed been running interference for the Obama campaign. They have been much more willing to take McCain to task for "negative campaigning" than even writing positive stuff about Obama. In other words, they have distracted the public from some major issues dealing with Obama's associates by laying into McCain for bringing them up in the first place.The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates—according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.
This is no surprise of course. Any reasonably aware observer can see the bias plainly. My neighbor across the street - who has little interest in politics except around election time - has been shocked at the level of bias in covering Sarah Palin. It doesn't take a political genius to see who the press has been rooting for in this campaign and how they have gone about making that known.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
