No matter where you turn these days, someone is talking about how Barack Obama is the media darling. How he gets all of the coverage and is being treated like the President when the election hasn’t even occurred yet. This notion that Obama gets all the media attention was a favorite talking point of Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was refusing to drop out of the race (never mind the fact that the Media kept her in it but talking about how it was a race down to the wire even when it was all but impossible for her to get the nomination). Unsurprisingly, it seems as if John McCain’s team has taken up the Clinton motto and now cries foul at the coverage that Obama is getting.
The Liberal Media scare tactic has been one the right has been using for years. And yet, the Neoconservative mouthpiece himself, Bill Kristol, has declared ”The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.” So what can we make of the latest effort by the right to proclaim a liberal media bias in its coverage of Obama? Pure lies and spin (what Fox News does best)!
Last week, the Center for Media and Public Affairs released a study showing that, in fact, the major news networks have been harder on Barack Obama than they have on John McCain. As the press release on the study declares:
These results are from the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) 2008 Election News Watch Project. They are based on a scientific content analysis of 249 election news stories (7 hours 38 minutes of airtime) that aired on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and Fox Special Report (first half hour) from June 8, 2008 to July 21, 2008. Previously we analyzed 2144 stories (43 hrs 30 min airtime) during the primary campaign from December 16, 2007 through June 7, 2008. We report on all on-air evaluations of the candidates by sources and reporters, after excluding comments by the campaigns about each other.
The study showed that of all on-air coverage of Barack Obama since the end of the primaries, seventy-two percent (72%) of it was negative. During that same time, however, John McCain has only received fifty-seven percent (57%) negative coverage. This is a huge turnaround from the primaries where the media coverage of Barack Obama was only thirty-eight percent (38%) negative (and although the Clinton coverage was a balanced 50/50 for the most part, much of the so-called negative coverage she received had to do with the performance of Mr. Clinton, who received a whopping seventy-six percent (76%) amount of negative coverage).
What the Right would like you to believe is that more coverage in terms of time spent discussing a candidate will show a liberal bias. Afterall, since June 8th,Obama has been the subject of 120 stories on the big three’s evening news programs, while McCain has only been the subject of 80. Hazzah! The media must favor Obama then…but look at the numbers, it doesn’t work that way. If Obama is receiving one and a half times the coverage of McCain, and yet 72% of that coverage is negative, it would follow that OBAMA IS RECEIVING BY FAR MORE NEGATIVE COVERAGE. That is roughly 86 negative stories on Obama, more than the McCain’s total number of stories. Delve further into the numbers and you see that McCain had roughly 45 positive stories to Obama’s 34. Needless to say, more coverage doesn’t necessarily mean a bias in any candidate’s favor.
If the numbers aren’t enough for you, let’s look at an anecdote. After goading Obama to travel abroad, the McCain team began attacking the presumptive Democrat nominee for leaving the country during campaign season. Then they released this ad claiming that Obama only gives a damn about the troops when the media is around:
If the media had some sort of pro-Obama slant, they certainly would have taken McCain to task for this commercial. Let’s forget for a second most of the false claims in the ad, like the notion that he is against troop funding, and focus upon the idea that the troops are merely a photo op for Obama. The claim in the commercial is that because Obama had time to go shoot hoops for the troops in front of the cameras, but canceled his visit to an Army base in Germany, that he is not for our troops. However, as a Pentagon spokesperson has clarified, officials at the Pentagon told the Obama camp after Obama was already en route that he could not visit the Army base with campaign staff in tow, stating that “[w]e informed the Obama staff that he was more than welcome to visit as Senator Obama, with Senate staff. However, he could not conduct the visit with campaign staff.” Thus, Obama had no choice but to cancel that specific visit.
Upon this realization one might think the so-called Liberal Media would go after McCain for such tactics. While the networks did comment upon the fact that Obama responded to McCain’s attempt to paint him negatively, they all (initially) failed to mention that the ad was in fact FALSE. MSNBC did eventually note that the ad was false, but the networks in general did not jump on McCain the way they would any other candidate who makes such a false statement.
So, the next time someone tells you there is a liberal bias in the media, tell them to get their facts checked. It shouldn’t take astute observations by the likes of Jon Stewart for people to start getting that the media goes after Obama. Then again, he does it better than anyone else:
2 comments:
really wonderful take on this. another great blog.
Nice article, but I would be interested in knowing what is defined as "negative" and "positive." It's hard to believe that media coverage can nicely fit into either category. So some might say that "any press is good press" and Obama at 120 and McCain at 80 would possibly indicate an Obama-bias?
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