Facts? Who needs ’em, when we’ve got Obama’s magic tax plan to promote and an uppity Alaska governor to trash?
At the risk of violating union rules, allow me to do a bit of reporting: A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”
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How dishonest is this commentary? The author attacks Obama for toasting someone he describes as "a prominent former PLO member" and a "frontman" for Yasser Arafat even though (1) McCain had funneled several lucrative democracy grants to the same person and (2) there is no credible evidence that he had ever been an Arafat aide.
This takes a wildly meaningless Pew statistic that merely reflects that journalists are reporting horse race coverage of polls that don't favor McCain. That he then turns it into an indictment of media bias in reporting is unconscionable. All this stat confirms is a woeful reliance on lazy horse race coverage. If McCain was ahead in the polls this same stat would show a strong "media bias" for him regardless of the tenor of whatever else was being reported.
I'd like to see the stat with the mere mentions of poll stats removed. Or a stat on actual attacks in the main stream media. But I'd prefer to see some actual journalism and analysis of the policy positions.
This news analysis is excellent journalism. It is consistent with every academic study of the media: they all determine that the press is highly biased or slanted toward the Democrats. Newsweek bragged after the '04 election that Kerry would not have gotten 40% if they had told how incompetent he was. As the author points out, the public knows this, and that is one reason why the Democratic media, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC are losing readers and viewers at an accelerating rate. USA Today, the most objective major publication, is the only one gaining readership.
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