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Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign
narcberry writes "After complaints of one-sided reporting, the Washington Post checked their own articles and agreed. Obama was clearly favored, throughout his campaign, in terms of more favorable articles, less criticism, better page real-estate, more pictures, and total disregard for problems such as his drug use. 'Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics. The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that. McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.'"
I'm glad someone is finally stating the obvious.
Is there any surprise? The media (with the exception of Fox News) has always had a pretty large liberal bias.
Having said that, Obama is young, charismatic, and is promoting the change America wants. He would have won either way.
...the voters. Isn't it natural that the winning candidate will appeal to the journalists more aswell, than the losing one? Especially in a historic election as this one.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
compare that too how many times Palin was in the news!
What is really surprising is that this is news! The media has admitted to this weeks ago.
Even worse, you will see people deny that Obama was given better treatment than McCain. They will probably say something similar to that old Politico story that basically says, "We had to give Obama better coverage. It's not our fault that McCain sucks".
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
1) Go to Daily Kos or a similar site and retrieve a vanity post from 2004 whining about Bush stealing the election
2) Replace Bush with Obama, and post to FreeRepublic
3) Drink a shot everytime someone replies positively
4) Die of alcohol poisoning
Irony laden fun for the whole family.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
The point, please?
The election is done and over with. You can sleep now.
How is it even possible someone would consider this to be "news"? This information is almost two years old now...
I don't see this as evidence of bias on the part of reporters, I see it at evidence of the Democratic Primary running as long as it did.
Also, the Republican campaign(s) threw a lot of mud which of course prompted coverage. If Mccain hadn't put Obama in the news so much, he wouldn't have been in the new so much. If the accusations had more merit the resulting coverage wouldn't have been as positive as it was.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
whoa, I predict the mother of all flame fests over this one.
In general the press print stories that they think will sell, perhaps Obama was more interesting? - there was lots of back stories to print on.
In the UK the press have a lot to answer for - for example, they talked Northern Rock up into a fiasco by warning people what would happen to their funds and hence everybody tried to withdraw their money at once. I have always thought news papers should be more responsible and not just profit orientated.
Of course there was a more favorable approach towards Obama, for all the reasons stated in the summary. I'd like to see a like-for-like comparison of Obama and McCain stories before the Republican sideshows of Sarah Palin and "Joe the Plumber" were introduced, because I did feel a lot more hate once they were on-board
The press over here in England still seem to be focused on the historic occasion of an African-American in power. It is a good thing and it has been noted, but I wish they would get back to focusing on how the right man won, regardless of race and what he is planning to do come January.
by the man to keep the white man down!
I ditched the TV 20 years ago, and the newspaper 5 years ago. I don't understand why anyone listens to the "main stream media" anymore. My in-laws think everything they see on TV "news" is Gospel, however.
Obama ran a better campaign?
Better campaigns get better press coverage. I know that sounds crazy, but generally people doing a good job get better reviews then people doing a bad job.
Of course, in the eyes of the idiocracy that is the modern Republican party, doing a good job is evil, and reporting on it is bias.
The constituency on the right stops painting the entire media as "commie liberul media with liberul bias" brush they'll get a bit better coverage.
Let's see your numbers on Palin douchebag submitter. She was dragged out of the backwaters to make more media interest and succeeded* at that.
Look at mee! I can pick and choose categories to make a weak non-statistically significant difference.
*if by 'succeeded' you don't distinquish between all media exposure and the folks simply pointing and laughing in print.
The goal of the media to sell advertising and papers. They do this by 'sexing' up the news as much as possible to make people want to read it. If it bleeds, it leads as they say. Why read boring stories about real substance when you can read Exciting! Stories! About Stars!
So its no surprise Obama had more favorabe coverage. He was by far the 'sexier' candidate.
(Tho Palin was hotter)
Do the numbers factor in Sarah Palin at all? I'm too lazy to sign up for the Post.
She was in the news quite a bit, at least a HECK of a lot more than Biden. I'm not saying her press was "good" but there was a lot of it.
Comparing Obama+Biden vs McCain+Palin probably results in closer numbers.
Besides, are we really surprised? Obama running as the Democrat nominee was history in the making. Of course he would get more press.
That's not "a pretty large liberal bias".
That is the Washington Post focusing on the easiest stories to "write". The ones that don't require any research. The ones that don't require any knowledge of the issues.
I can't speak for other countries, but that was certainly the case here in Australia - Obama was being discussed as if he were already president, and McCain was rarely mentioned (the Americans being interviewed had to keep reminding the Australian reporters that McCain even existed). Perhaps it has something to do with the excitement of the possibility of the first black president, or perhaps the political alignment of Australia made us favour Obama, who knows?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
...but nothing in life is fair anyway. Obama was mentioned 20% more than McCain (946/786) overall. June 4th to Election Day it's even tighter at 7% (626/584), and as far as cover stories, 17% more (176+41 vs 144+41).
Considering that 1) he was somewhat unknown, and 2) not the same old white guy that we've always had, I can see why he was featured more. Besides, we've known McCain's stances and basic principles since his run in 2000 at least, so we actually needed to hear a bit from the other candidate.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Post it to RedState.
Do they still run on that Communist Open Sores content delivery system?
Best Slashdot Co
I'm not in the USA, so the variety press I saw can't be accused of party bias. And yes, I saw more headlines about Obama.
But isn't the reason obvious? He generated more newsworthy headlines. He was, frankly, more interesting, regardless of your opinion of him
And surely it wasn't completely one-sided - Palin was in MANY, MANY headlines - whereas I didn't see anything of Biden.
Everything press-related is so controlled, I see no reason to be surprised by this - the Democrats knew Obama was a strong personality and good headline generator; the Republicans knew that they needed to push Palin to reassure their traditional voters who were worried about McCain.
In other words - nothing to see here, move along.
My fellow Americans, let me be the last to retail slanderous rumors. I have great respect for Mr. Obama and his family. But when our nation and our GOD-given rights are at risk, no patriot can remain silent. It has coem to my attention that our worst fears have been confirmed. "Barack Obama," whose real name is Giuseppe Franconi, is an agent of the sinister Italian power! Americans, imagine the not-so-far future: government agents violating the sanctity of our TV-rooms, our base ball parks, and our children's schools and churches, confiscating our GOD-given hot dogs and replacing them with salamies! Is this the "change" you believe in? Is this your "hope" for the future? I for one will not remain silent as nefarious Italian agents use the cover of the freedoms that we love to spirit their nefarious ices into our Democratic sanctuary.
Now let me say I have nothing against the Italian people, who are a peace-loving people with a noble and historic culture. Their language, Mexican, is shared by many proud, upstanding hispanic citizens of this great land. But the hot-dog conspiracy is war, by a small secret cabal of Italians who hate freedom and our GOD-given meat products, and our freedom to eat hot dogs in our tv rooms must be defended. As long as I am the president, this administration will take the fight to the enemy and defeat the Italian menace. Thank you and GOD BLESS AMERICA
What if all those stories were negative?
Isn't any pre-election article about one candidate also pretty much an article about their opponent(s)?
If I read an article about Candidate A concerning Issue X, isn't that article likely to mention Candidate B's stance on Issue X as well?
What if one candidate simply had more reportable news?
Simply having a greater number of stories written about you means absolutely nothing. If I'm a staunchly against Candidate A, it doesn't really matter how many stories I read about Candidate A's support of issues I disagree with... I'm still going to disagree with them. The Washington Post, I would say, has a fairly informed readership. There aren't many people that read it that are going to be making up their mind so close to an election.
sig.
Bush had a good run in the media especially in making "the case" in the war against Iraq. He got a nice handshake from the mainstream media then, but when the shoe is on the other foot it's like the end of the world. Besides, the Republicans got so unpopular after two Bush terms it would be hard enough ramming the same trash down people's throats again.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Before they chose running mate, I might by this. However, after McCain chose Palin, for better or worse, there was a lot of Obama who?
Collect all political editorials that focus on one side or another and the spin they use. That might actually be interesting.
the sky is blue and water is wet.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Amazing how everyone can agree that in the last decades pretty much all public values and personal virtues degrading.
Amazing how it all coincides with abandonment of the Christian religion and its morals.
I'd say you've pretty much nailed it with that comment. A lot of the coverage of Obama was prompted by attacks that he was "pallin' around with terrorists" and whatnot. The press investigated, found that the concerns were baseless, and the result was what ammounts to a positive story for Obama. Then, of course, McCain keeps up the attacks and the press writes what ammounts to a negative story about how McCain is slinging mud on the campaign trail. It's not really that the press was biased (though I will give you that the media does tend to have a leftist tilt), so much as that they covered what was happening on the election trail. How was anyone supposed to spin the facts as a positive story for McCain? Obama, on the other hand, didn't give the press much chance to cover McCain. His attacks were far fewer, and according to most fact checkers nearly every one of them had merit.
One of the candidates (Obama) was a lot more newsworthy than the other, and the news coming out of both campaigns was decidedly different. You can't blame the press if MacCain campaign was all about a self-described "pitbull with lipstick" "hockey mom" with a $150K campaign wardrobe, a secessionist husband, and foreign policy experience that consisted of a geographical proximity to Russia. It's not the press making it up when McCain in rapid succession says he knows nothing about the economy, asserts that it is fundamentally sound, then suspends his campaign because he's so important in rescuing it (only to sit there silent in the meeting then return to his campaign). The press didn't make this stuff up - even the $150K clothes was somthing that was emphasized by disgruntled McCain insiders. The whole McCain campaign was about negativity - trying to shoot Obama down - while Obama's was much more positive - about change and hope and the future. You can't blame the press for reflecting the tone of the campaigns or reporting on their self-generated news (Joe the non-business-purchasing, non-plumber was even on the campaign trail with McCain), nor can you blame them for runnning more stories on the more newsworthy candidate. The press should be reporting on the news - they're not meant to be suppressing the differences and reporting both in equal column inches and in equally glowing terms ("Will Ameria elect historic first septuagenarian as president?", "Hitler sees bright future for germany!").
and anybody voting for him!
(What kind of a kinky name is that anyway??)
..."Reality has a strong liberal bias."
My take on this is that Obama's candidacy and success were in fact more newsworthy than McCain's. Obama changed the game in a lot of ways, both in terms of who he is and how he ran. McCain was more of a known quantity to begin with, and ran a fairly ordinary race. In fact, the most remarkable thing about McCain's campaign (apart from the stunt-casting VP pick, which generated plenty of news)was that it was so painfully typical, where McCain used to do things more his own way.
In short, if McCain had made more news, he might have gotten more headlines. Instead, he was mostly yesterday's news.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Indeed, journalism is dead. The only difference between the "mainstream media" and conservative talk radio is that the radio people are more honest, as in they admit that what they are doing is opinion, and state plainly their stances whilst the old media pretends to be "unbiased".
BTW, could it be that people are waking up to this have something to do with ALL the major newspapers losing circulation rapidly, and the Big 3 networks also continuing to lose viewers? Fox News is #1 not because they are any less biased, but because they ALONE in major media gives voice to the other side.
Corporatism != Free Market
It can't hurt to let the new president, backed up by congress, in on the fact that you were always gunning for him.
I imagine the news slant was particularly painful for McCain after accepting public financing. Having 1/8th the war chest and the news coverage is disfavoring you, too... It's funny because McCain used to be such a media darling before he was on the Republican's presidential ticket. I guess he got outshined.
Well, I don't think there was ever a way for McCain to win. People voted to show their discontentment with previous Republican president, and McCain's commercials/debates/opinions were kind of irrelevant.
Even so, if the Obama presidency unhatches any nasty surprises on us, the first thing we do should be to demand the media's head on a platter for softballing him in.
McCain did try to get around some of his negatives through his VP pick, but in his desperation he turned to a woman he didn't truly understand...
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
On NPR's Talk Of The Nation show last week, they had callers from all over the world give reactions to Obama's victory. I was shocked to hear Palestinians, Iranians and everyone be so totally knowledgeable about US internal politics. They talked about the Christian Right, neocons, and more. They sounded just like American media junkie citizens.
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news. They are influenced by media coverage just like US residents are.
Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one.
Maybe I'm not conspiratorial enough in my thinking. Have we allowed a self-appointed unregulated, unaccountable group of elites to take control of world opinion and thus overshadow the power of people and governments?
Is democracy a viable form of government if voter opinions are so readily influenced and shaped by the media?
Suddenly, I'm no longer so sure that absolute freedom of the press is such a good idea any more.
Here's a personal account of an election worker in Iowa dealing with voter "purges":
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/10/precinct_elections_official/
Do not start talking about "fair" without also addressing those purges.
And from TFA:
So you're talking about a difference of 160 stories. Over almost a year. Let's just call it a year. That means we're talking about a difference of less than 1 story every two days.
Meanwhile, McCain's 786 stories equates to just over 2 stories every day for a year.
Compared to Obama's 946 which equates to ... just over 2 stories every day for a year.
But every THIRD day, Obama would get THREE stories and McCain would only get TWO stories.
Yeah, and you're going to complain about the press "favored" Obama?
Because it's not relevant.
Sure, you can survey the number of times this candidate was mentioned in a positive or negative light and give an `objective' metric to compare to other candidates. The problem is that such a methodology ignores whether or not a candidate deserves those positive or negative mentions. To take extreme cases, consider either Alaska's Ted Stevens or Louisiana's William Jefferson. One would claim that if media coverage of these two men wasn't disproportionately negative that this would show bias. Sometimes a candidate is deserving of being attacked (or lauded) more frequently than his or her opponent.
The whole election was a complete farce and "you people" are arguing over whether the media is liberal? The Republican party ran the most unelectable ticket possibly in its history with a man dying from cancer paired with a psychotic dingbat in order to force the election to the Democrats this year - but Obama voted both for FISA and for the $700B handout, so clearly he is in favor of illegal wiretaps and handouts for the rich. The Media has been married to the government ever since Hearst utilized his (news) paper industry to attack the (hemp) paper industry by demonizing marijuana - which not only served the goals of the group within the government to which he belonged, but also helped protect his (wood pulp) paper industry. And just in case anyone thinks that McCain had anything to do with his choice of running mate, candidates really DON'T get to make that kind of choice themselves. Their party assigns them a running mate, and they do as they are told. An amusing anecdote along these lines is that when Reagan was paired with Not-Yet-Mass-Murderer-George-Pervert-Fucker-Bush, his response was "anyone but that guy" - but we made the former head of the CIA our vice president, and the rest is history.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I doubt that was the whole reason behind the bias. Take CNN for example (I know a poor excuse for a news site), most of their banner ads were Obama campaign ads. Would the editors want to bite the hand that has 150 million dollars to spend on advertising?
Disclosure: I voted for Obama. I really liked McCain and voted for him during the primary. However, I couldn't see myself rewarding the unelected GOP bureaucrats another 4 years to really screw up this country. Especially in light that McCain couldn't control the dumb ass GOP campaign advisers, so how could we expect him to control his GOP cabinet?
I would have voted for a McCain/Lieberman independent ticket..
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
If you care about the health of our democracy we better hope that the media does not treat Obama with kid gloves here on out, and end up becoming state press. I am quite upset that the WashPost did not add too and complete its story on the Barack Obama campaign credit card donation fraud. I provided evidence in the form of bank statements, screen shots, etc and was speaking directly to the reporter who wrote the article. He informed me that they were working on the story, even the day before the election, but nothing came of it. One wonders who squelched it. The media also needs to recognize the vast majority of McCain voters, voted against Obama not because of his race but because of his ideology and the direction we think he will take the country in. If they continue to treat all McCain voters by some sterotypical image of a bubba in backwoods somewhere, that is bad press and needs to be countered. Additionally, if BHO and his Democratic allies have their way, the voice of the conservatives on the AM dial will be squelched. The media should, in its own interest, understand this is not good for our democracy.
While listening to NPR, I was struck by how one-sided the coverage was. The pinnacle of the disparity had to be when, during a segment on McCain, barely mentioned McCain's but they stated Obama's positions in detail.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Why, then, are we expecting that the bizarre campaign of a man who is a shadow of who he was running with an uninformed hatemonger and which wants to continue
would get as much positive press as a smooth campaign by two qualified candidates running on a platform of
Sometimes the reason the story is positive is because the subject is positive.
With GW not around to kick reporters are going to have to start doing research instead of getting on the GW/Republican bash bandwagon.
Sure, the Republicans can still filibuster but how many stories can you REALLY write about that?
8 years of GW made for easy reporting. All you had to do was put your finger in the wind and report about Guantanamo, the "War", Civil liberties abuse, etc. It's not hard to eat when you are in front of the Buffet.
Obama got more coverage, but a higher percentage of his coverage was negative compared to McCain's coverage. This is just more conservative spin from the so-called "liberal media".
is not exactly news, yes? There will be some bias towards having more Obama stories because he is unusual (voter turnout, fundraising, etc.)
Although there may have been other sources of bias too, if the Democratic columnists love Obama but the Republican ones are cool on McCain, that's bound to introduce a bias in editorial comment on its own.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
If you have watched the campaigns of both McCain and Obama, there is also a clear difference in what has been said on both sides. It was even more clear for the month leading up to the election.
The Obama campaign has spent the most time saying what Barack Obama felt were the solutions to the problems, and talking about the problems out there. There was very little McCain/Palin bashing from the campaign. It may have been the press coverage, but I didn't see the Obama camp really stirring up anti-McCain feelings with fairly few advertisements saying why people should not vote for McCain.
On the other hand, EVERY rally that McCain and Palin were at showed no solutions, just reasons why they said not to vote for Obama. This shows why McCain lost, because he didn't show he was focused on why people should vote for him.
So, in the press, why should they cover, "Republican candidate bashes Obama but says nothing about how to deal with the issues" day in and day out? If McCain was more presidential BEFORE his concession speech, he would have done better.
Also, when a candidate ONLY focuses on his/her "base", it makes anyone not in that group feel that there is no reason to support that person. If people in the press have a normal bias toward a more moderate to liberal candidate, then those who are focused on ONLY targeting the conservative people, it just makes for there being no real news if that conservative candidate doesn't say anything new.
Did McCain EVER talk about having real solutions, or just how people should be afraid of having Obama as president?
When Obama went on The View the first question was "Aren't you related to Brad Pitt?" When McCain when on The View his first question was about Iraq.
Charlie Rose almost always talked about "President Obama" before he was elected. A week before the election, Tom Brokaw said to Rose that the press and the country don't know anything about Obama. Jon Meechan of Newsweek said almost the same thing -- and Rose agreed. Well, hell's bells, they had two years to investigate the guy but just waved to him in passing. Where was the shoeleather work from the press?
But the reactions here (on Slashdot) to articles about the candidates various technological positions did seem to do fairly well from a "number of comments" point of view.
I'd say that this is more a matter of the same phenomena that we see in every election now. The "pundits" talk about whatever is easiest for them to talk about. And they're words get coverage because it's easier for the "reporters" to just regurgitate whatever they've heard.
So, rather than research a subject and ask INFORMED questions of the candidates THEMSELVES we get the topic de jour from the pundits, then echoed by the reporters, then echoed by other reporters and then echoed by other pundits. Since all of the pundits and reporters are talking about it, it MUST be an important issue, right?
I think that is why we saw so many websites pop up this election that did independent fact-checking of the candidates' public statements.
Since the Federal Government has shown it will offer to bail out companies in industries that are "too large to fail", and since an "objective" press is so important to our society, it's obvious that the media are hoping that they'll get Federal dollars to keep going, even if it means we get the NYTimes or the WaPo delivered whether we want it or not.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
If the dude can't even keep from eating his foot or cowering to Nancy Reagan in the span of 3 days, how can we reasonably expect him to handle an ex-KGB agent who runs his country through a puppet and who is staging his return as that country's president (this time, probably for life)?
Because standing up to Putin won't cost him any votes in 2012, whereas offending Nancy Reagan very well could have?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Being apologetic is not a sign of cowardice. It is actually a sign of great courage that many leaders have the skill to do so.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
The press didn't favor Obama, fucking REALITY fucking favored Obama. Is it his fault he was more interesting than the other guy? Is it the media's fault? This article makes me very angry. If a volcano erupts in the middle of the Atlantic, is it legally required to get the same media coverage as a volcano that erupts in the middle of Tokyo? MORE INTERESTING THINGS DESERVE, AND GET, MORE NEWS COVERAGE. Obama was interesting. McCain was not. Is every newspaper obligated to split their front page down the middle and print mirror image articles about how great and wonderful every action of each of the twin candidates is? Does the fucking Washington Post even realize that it's not their obligation to print the exact same number of articles about everyone who runs for president? ARGH. Stupidity.
Okay, I don't really understand the big deal about the Press "favoring" Obama throughout the campaign. Does anyone think that maybe, just maybe, the reason why Obama got more favorable press coverage was because: 1. he didn't fuck up nearly as bad as McCain in all aspects of the campaign and 2. he actually tried to appeal to the people through actions and (admittedly) vague promises of reform and change, which thus led the media to dig deeper into Obama's issues and inform the public of (what would end up being good things) he actually wanted to do?
Hell, even McCain made it a point to focus everything on Obama, forcing the media to give the big O even more press coverage. Every time Obama talked about his plan, his policy, or whatnot, McCain just came back with talking about how Obama's plan was wrong, with little focus on his own plans. Hell, the only time McCain was ever in the news for something he did was some idiotic Palin shit or a gaffe. When both candidates are so focused on the actions of one of them (Palin's issues notwithstanding), of course the press is going to favor one over the other. In addition, when one candidate makes his platform consist of basically nothing but attacks on the other, I think that helps out the press coverage as well.
No foolin'. (yes, sarchasm)
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
...that maybe there were more favorable articles about him because he's actually a better person...?
Naw... can't be that. Must be media bias.
I love this line: "The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager."
Maybe because we're finally getting away from considering a person's past drug use as a delimiter of what kind of person they are?
The past two presidents before Obama have been admitted drug users, and they still got voted in.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Judging by the voter turnout, Americans were biased towards Obama....
Obama was new and had to be vetted, thus of course there were more articles about him. Of course, there was more positive coverage of him vs McCain as McCain's campaign often lied and distorted things about Obama.
Fair does not mean equal.
Yes, Obama was clearly favored by the media. He was clearly favored by the American people, too!
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
no surprise
The young, photogenic, would-be first black President gets more attention than the puffy old white guy? Say it ain't so, America, say it ain't so!
Of course, this is also easily explained by the fact that reality has a liberal bias.
The way the OP and Fox News are whinging, you'd think the Post was Pravda, i.e. the only game in town. Hey, here's news-- the Post is not the one and only "Press". You don't like it, read the Washington Times. Or the Journal. Or the NY Daily News.
I'm really getting sick of Fox News' whole "oppressed majority" thing. They're the #1 cable news outlet, yet they're always on about "The Media" this and "The Media" that. Hey, more news-- you're the media! And you cancel out the Post quite nicely, so shaddap.
The press is under no obligation to be completely balanced. If the press seemed to favor Obama throughout the campaign, it was only because McCain chose to flip-flop from many positions he held during his first presidential run - when he was an actual maverick. Since then, the press has assumed nothing but bad faith on his part.
They should do this for the Democrat party primary too. I think that would be interesting.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
Obama makes a major speech on race, lauded by all sides, which is dully reported by the media. Did Obama dominate the headlines for a week round that, under a positive light? You betcha.
McCain "rushes" to Washington, suspends his campaign and accomplishes exactly nothing, which is dully reported under a negative light? of course!
This isn't media bias. It is candidates getting their just desserts.
Media bias would be if McCain had given a historic speech, defining his candidacy away from Bush, Rove and the religious right and it didn't get reported. But that, my friends, never happened.
Only if you're counting the popular vote instead of the electoral college vote. And if you're doing that then you need to look at who voted how in which state.
And who did NOT vote. People simply were not motivated enough by McCain to get out and vote for him. And that percentage is far larger than the difference in the coverage.
First off, Palin's own actions and words were what got her that kind of coverage on the comedy shows.
Secondly, the press did cover Biden's "gaffes".
But it is a self-referential system. Palin gave the comedy shows better material. Which means that the newspapers covered the comedy shows covering Palin. Which means that the pundits talked about the newspaper coverage of the comedy shows' coverage of Palin.
McCain chose Palin. That was part of his strategy to energize the Religious Right AND an attempt to get the female vote. It's his own fault if she ended up feeding material to the media that he would rather not have fed to them.
At some point in the past, the press stopped being interested in the truth and started promoting conflict. This was mainly because instead of sending reporters to pull documents and ask questions, it was much easier to simply interview two pundits on "both sides" of a given issue. Sometimes this was too much, and the press simply made stories out of the press releases put out by organizations on "both sides" of an issue.
The problem with this approach (other than its amazing laziness) is that sometimes, there are simply issues that don't have two viable sides. The party on one end is almost certainly right and the party on the other is almost certainly wrong.
I'll give an example: whether or not to go to war in Iraq. One side had been militarizing the intelligence community to produce information it wanted to hear; it had ignored this same militarized intelligence when even that did not produce evidence of large weapons in Iraq; and it attempted to destroy persons who pointed out these facts. There was no evidence of an international Iraqi threat, and the people who were saying that one existed were simply wrong.
The press did a huge disservice to the public by treating these people seriously, even long after they had discredited themselves in the eyes of the public.
If the press seemed to favor Obama in this election, what of it? It was hard to ignore the fact that he was, by the judgment of a pretty large majority of educated people, the far superior man for the job. Sometimes the plain facts on the ground aren't "balanced," and it is wrong of press to give the impression that they are. There's a seed of truth to the famous Colbert assertion that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
---don't make me break out my red pen.
Oh, and when asked about his drug use back in October 2006 said "Of course I inhaled. That was the point". On video.
No, I have no idea why the media would not want to spend reporting resources and column inches covering this repeatedly.
And would you agree that Obama has been far more open about his illegal substance abuse than certain other presidents?
wouldn't you expect the first black nominee that has a legit shot to win to get more press coverage than guy who's been on the scene forever?
Okay, so the press favored Obama...Big deal. HE WAS THE BETTER CANDIDATE. After watching the voting record of the "majority" for the past 8 years, I am glad to see the media take a stand and make a difference in this world. The last 8 years proved that the sheep NEEDED to be TOLD to vote for Obama, because McCain would have won easily if they hadn't.
The media realized that they were American Citizens first and Journalists second, and I am proud of them for standing up for what they believe in. They did the best thing that was in the interest of this great nation. Now, we just need to keep Obama in office for 8 years, hopefully more. The media's job is not done!
The country is a much better place now that Obama was elected, and I thank the media for making this a reality.
My main concerns with Main Stream Media is the loss of journalistic integrity that used to be the cornerstone of reporting. The liberal bias towards Obama was clearly evident throughout both the primary and presidential campaigns, hell even SNL did a skit on it. I don't have a problem with the slant, everyone is allowed there opinion; however, I have a problem when these biases being stated as fact.
Last week, after Obama won the election, the BBC published an article stating how world leaders were pleased by the outcome. This article then used the opinion of a BBC journalist as factual statement!
If the Washington Post wants to publish more articles on Obama than McCain that's fine, but don't complain then when Fox News goes out and does the same thing.
Perhaps the Democrats had a better funded public relations campaign that helped them get the media interested.
Or they just had a more charismatic candidate. Since one of the points of a charismatic candidate is to get media attention, it's really not surprising.
Can we please tag this is "notnews" instead of "news." Must be a slow day...
Then feel free to dig up your own numbers and process them however you want. Just be ready to justify WHY you chose that/those particular numbers and processing methods.
Great. Now check out Fox news for counter examples.
Which is one of the reasons why you have to look at TOTAL numbers and not the comments of individuals.
Obama spoke in the open in Europe and thousands of people attended those events.
McCain would not try that in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It isn't the destination written on the ticket. It is the ACTIONS taken at that destination.
McCain's trips got the same coverage as Obama's trips.
McCain's ACTIONS on got less coverage because his ACTIONS did not generate any new NEWS.
If McCain had drawn the crowd in Iraq that Obama had in Germany that would have been huge news. And it would have been covered as such.
In other non-news, news is a business. They will always sell what sells.
The reporters covering the campaigns are writing a big chunk of the stories. If the campaign isn't giving them 'good' material that passes the sniff test, the reporter will find it hard to write a 'positive' story. I think this 'bias' may also be a reflection of the quality of the campaign 'news releases' and 'spin' and the decisions by the McCain campaign to limit access and not be available. The Obama campaign was pretty good at responding within the typical news cycle to the volleys of increasingly wild attacks by McCain campaigners and surrogates while the criticisms of the McCain campaign and character concerns mounted by the Obama campaign were experienced as even handed, credible, and to the point. The media had to be impressed at a candidate who didn't lose his cool, who stayed focused on the overall ground game, who charged in where there was signs of weakness, and who didn't give up territory once gained. Republicans really, really want to believe they were sabbatoged by the media somehow, since it is much harder to believe that Obama's hundreds of thousands of volunteers and donors, largely via the web and good old phone system, could mount such an effective ground game that the McCain propaganda catapults were minimized. It didn't hurt that Obama was able to raise money like no previous candidate has--anyone still want to accept the Supreme Court notion "money=free speech". In the end, McCain and Palin were shooting each other in the foot, they disgusted George Will and other more thoughtful conservatives. When there are deeply fundamental things wrong with America, Americans don't want Mavericks, we want the folks who know how to pull together the best brains, focus our efforts, and who can call respectfully and inspiringly for the support of all. Obama didn't spend much time in angry attack mode. While he did respond to criticism and made some snappy rejoinders, he spent as much time as he could inspiring and articulating a very hopeful vision. America and the world has had enough of Lee Atwater/Karl Rove school of slash and burn propaganda. Enjoy your tax cuts! ...if you are still employed in 2009.
Wow, you are even more bigoted than the news media. The fact is that McCain is not an axe murderer. He is a politician who represents the interests of over 40% of the country's politician.
And as far as Obama is concerned, he also
See, other people can make disparaging remarks as though they are facts too.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
McCain's campaign was quite incoherent and spent a great deal of time reeling from self-inflicted gaffes. The general negativity of the campaign didn't also endear him to the press, who do have a sense of fair play.
Obama, on the other hand, ran a far tighter ship and made very few mistakes. It also helped that he had an upbeat, positive, can-do campaign with a simple theme. People tend to appreciate that.
It assumes that both candidates would receive equal coverage and baseline "happiness" levels.
This is not real.
Reporting tends to be a reflection of popular sentiment than the creation of it.
This is undoubted a surprised only to those who were swept away by the "change" mania....
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
And what's pork? Most Americans would view stuff that their own Congressman brings home as "economic development" and stuff that the other 434 bring home as "pork".
I define pork as any budget line item that primarily benefits fewer than five states. Cut federal taxes and raise state taxes, and let the several states pay for their own pork.
When asked for comment, a member of Dr Paul's staff blamed Jewish control of the media.
It always amazes me when people start ranting "What about this??! Why isn't the media telleing us about it?"
The reality, of course, is that the ranter only knows about it because someone in the media told him about it.
The press has never been, will never be, and cannot be perfectly impartial, perfectly fair, and perfectly objective. It's a foolish objective to demand.
People who want to pay attention to the news need to understand that they cannot expect any single source to provide all their news. They need to understand the influences at work in the media sources they consume.
For example, it's a waste of time to complain that The Washington Post shows a pro-Democratic lean. That's not new information. The Post has been leaning Democratic for decades. Likewise, The Washington Times leans right, and, in fact, was created expressly for that market, just like Fox News.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I think the news media doesn't really understand what fair coverage means. In the presidential election, anytime either candidate did something dumb, the news media was afraid to cover it because people would say Oh, there is another bad story about candidate X, that channel must be biased. So instead, the news networks would just put one automaton from each party on the air and have them recite their lines and call it fair coverage. I think the news media tried too hard to make coverage "fair," and never did any real analysis of the stories.
* The democratic primary was a race for significantly longer, hence more coverage
* Obama has a better face to put on a cover if your aim is to attract people to buy the thing - see all the magazines who don't care about the news and who they put on the cover (pretty faces).
* McCain spent more time on the "Obama is the wrong because" theme, than Obama did on the "McCain is wrong because" theme. If Obama is talking about Obama, and McCain is talking about Obama it's not a surprise who the press talks about.
* Obama is a more interesting story from a news perspective. Dog bites man isn't news, man bites dog is. Old white male running for President isn't news, (relatively) young black male running for President is.
* I suspect Palin stole some of McCain's coverage too. Again (relatively) young woman is news, and pretty faces on the cover sell.
First black Presidential Candidate. Are you really that surprised there's more articles written about him?
The Republican in me wants to make some kind of witty comeback, but all I can to is wait. Wait and watch and hope things don't get worse.
Was it that Obama was favored, or that McCain was legitimately a BAD CANDIDATE?
Since he was a first term senator, he has MUCH less baggage than John McCain. A shorter history in government meant less to ding him on other than his "inexperience."
Honestly, I count his inexperience as an asset. McCain has had many years to be bought and sold by many corporations and has had all of that time to contradict himself over and over.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I wanted to vote for McCain (I'm a small business owner)
That would have been a mistake. Unless your business is insanely profitable, you would've gained nothing from McCain. His health insurance plan, for instance, would have been a disaster for everyone but insurance companies. In general, conservative policies are only good for big business and the investor class.
We've had the same BS with Sarkozy here; he claims he's pro-business, but his fiscal measures only profited the wealthiest. And most small business owners aren't that rich. In particular, just like McCain's plan, he targeted income tax; if your small biz is incorporated, as it should be (mine is!), this makes no difference at all to the business itself. It only matters when you've made so much money that you are going to pay yourself.
And if you don't want to pay that income tax, just invest that surplus money into expanding the business. Corollary: with decreasing income tax, it becomes more attractive for the small biz owner to just take more of the profits, instead of investing and hiring.
No shit! He was always the "chosen one". After getting picked up by Zbignew Brzezinski at Columbia University during the 70's he has been destined for the job.
He will invade Pakistan.
He will create youth brigades.
He will preside over the total collapse of the states.
God help us all.
See http://mediamatters.org/items/200811050005?f=h_latest and references there.
It was quite clear that the likes of CNN.com, MSNBC, etc were actively campaigning for Obama.
Nearly ever article for Obama was positive, if something mentioned a negative the end of the article would place a caveat on it. The media failed to address dozens of stories that would have tarnished Obama's pristine image. Meanwhile, McCain got poor treatment, bad photos, and if an article highlighted McCain positives it always had a caveat of negativity at the end.
The media excuse "Obama was new, exciting" is hogwash. Sarah Palin was equally new and just as exciting. But in the four days following the announcement of her, the mainstream media went on a rampage digging up any inkling of scandal. Even fabricating scandal. The same with Joe the Plumber.
Meanwhile, in a year and a half, I have discover a fair amount of disturbing information on Obama. Some of it via first person research. Material the media would usually take 6 months to release if they ever mentioned it at all.
Frankly, the mainstream media should all be forced to drop the moniker of being "journalists" and simply file with the IRS as a Political Action Committee. Because frankly, they had more in common with PAC groups than ANYTHING to do with investigative journalism and reporting.
The press at times seems to show clear bias, but aside from openly partisan forums (fora) like
MSNBC and Fox News, the press seems slanted towards stories that resonate with the public.
For example, the New York Times, which is the favorite flogging horse of the right, pursued the dead-end Clinton Whitewater scandal long after it became clear there was nothing there. Conversely they gave eight columns of uncritical support to the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
It is just that at that point in time, headlines about Whitewater and WMDs sold newspapers.
In fact, Obama had cinched the election long before the election (at least two weeks earlier by McCain's own internal polling as reported after the election in CNN). Did the supposedly Obama-biased press report this? Of course not. They went on pretending it was a nail bitter right until the second the California polls closed, when they informed the nation that Obama had lapped the field and would become the next president.
Voters favored Obama throughout election!
Bias consists in favoring one side irrespective of the facts. When something is done because the facts require it, that's not bias.
Was there bias in this case? Judge for yourselves. But get your standards straight first.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I wrote all those positive articles about Obama. It's my fault - sorry. Next time I promise to write more articles about socially, economically and environmentally backward candidates.
--- What?
He showed McCain's 2008 concession speech: boos from the republican crowd.
He then showed Kerry's 2004 concession speech: no boos from the democratic crowd.
Notice how it's the right always claiming that the other side is just as bad as they are. Authoritarians: it's not bad/illegal when WE do it!
Is the fact that the media favored McCain over Romney who was a VASTLY better candidate. I remember hearing them all say how great McCain was. What a crock! They were only saying this because they knew he was the easiest to beat. And don't give me that baloney about Romney's Mormonism when NBC runs a special entitled "Who cares if Obama is a muslim?" If you don't care about that then you should care less about Mormonism. At least they're not the ones convincing their zealot followers to go blow themselves up.
The better candidate gets more coverage?
SHOCKING.
McCain had a hugely positive relationship with the media, allowing him to make gaffes like the "Iraq/Pakistan border" and referring to countries which haven't existed in decades right up until the point he started complaining about the press Obama was getting and denying them access.
And oh yeah. The press are supposed to act like journalists, not stenographers. The job of the press isn't to just put the candidates up on pedestals, it's to investigate their claims. John McCain didn't give them anything positive to say about his own campaign; he ran the entire race about Obama. How on earth, even if they did intend to give equal airtime to both candidates, could they have avoided talking more about Obama? When all of the bogus charges McCain/Palin leveled at the man turned up false, how could they have avoided speaking positively of him?
Damn that liberal media! Because of them, Ron Paul didn't get elected!
You're a genuius. Actually, we folk out here watch our own local news.
We even have TV shows in other languages than ENGLISH !
What would you know of world opinion to be able to compare it to "US media's dominant spin"?
You watch all our TV shows in all our languages?
What.....a.....dork.
I find it interesting that they do this review AFTER the election.
The point is to be continually reviewing these types of things so they can be corrected as needed. Not come out sometime after the fact and say..."My surveys show that they are right"
This point should apply to ANYTHING not just political coverage.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
The NY Giants are receiving much more and more favorable coverage than the Detroit Lions. It must be proof of some sort of bias, right?
'cause so did I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The survey was taken of articles since November 11, 2007. Since the democratic primary was by far the more hotly contested, I would expect Obama & Clinton were more newsworthy than McCain in the months leading up to June, 2008.
With that confounding factor, I can't see how the statistics mean anything.
Slashdot favors Linux over Microsoft. OMG!!!
The press is not free because the current government allows it, but because representative government requires it. Without free speech and the free press, there are no other freedoms.
This line alone trumps all the BS in the GP.
This poo is cold.
I really find it funny how much you hear about the liberal media and how they are always shoving their liberal agenda down your throat. What I really find funny about this is that you are hearing this FROM the liberal media. I would recommend checking out a couple of documentaries, "Manufacturing Consent" and "The Myth of the Liberal Media". Of course I'm quite sure that both of these will be considered liberal as they advocate taking what you are spoon fed with a grain of salt.
As I watched the election coverage it seemed to me that the media had a far more right wing agenda. I saw reports asking, "Is Obama too black to be president", "Is Obama not black enough to be president", "Is Obama too fit to be president". No one seemed to question McCain with these type of questions. It was just a given that somehow because he is a Republican that he is ready. Even when he selected Palin as VP she got some press criticism but they focused far more on making her a celebrity. After the election concluded the press finally let us in on things they knew all along about her that would seem relevant to her being a heartbeat away from leader of the free world. For instance the fact that she didn't know that Africa was a continent and not a country. That to me would seem to be an important thing for our leader to know. But maybe I'm just "too liberally biased".
You're overlooking one critical aspect of responsibility: it's not an external decision imposed on you. It's an internal decision you impose on yourself.
Yes, the First Amendment gives you the right to say almost anything you care to. Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is an example of something the First Amendment does not give you the right to do. The example of the Westboro Baptist Church, on the other hand, is something that is protected under First Amendment rights.
Where does responsibility meet the First Amendment? In the first case, by not spreading false and potentially harmful information. In the second case... there's no act of responsibility behind that particular organization's communications.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
you think conservatives will now realize that negative campaigning gives the other guy more press? Probably not (sigh!)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, your kidding, right? Yahoo and a couple others had already reported this, BEFORE THE ELECTION.
Now that the liberal biased media has their candidate in office, we will see EXACTLY what the uninformed buzzword lovers enacted.
This is the problem with electing someone who screams "change" all the time. It is a great word, but nobody told us what it means.
What it meant was, "I'll say whatever I need to get elected and go down in history, but the only change your really going to NOTICE is the color of my skin, because all us politicians are pretty much the same".
Obama ran a much better bullshitathon. Now we are in for a bumby ride, here in the Obamanation.
--Toll_Free
Wouldn't the three months of additional primary battles account for the difference of 160 articles? Since there's primary coverage every day, it should at least account for 90 of them. Also, if you're talking about a level playing field, McCain went into this with a tremendous advantage in terms of past favorable coverage. He has been about the most covered, and best-liked by the press, senator for at least a decade. Obama was not starting with that positive press advantage, while McCain was mostly running on that "maverick" brand which a friendly press had established for him - and which was in many respects, which the press failed to illuminate since they rarely cast doubt on their own creations, more myth than fact.
It also appeared to be McCain's own strategy during the later Democratic primaries to lie low and avoid getting headlines, while Obama and Clinton blasted each other. If he'd cut a higher profile, he'd have made himself more of a target for them, and they wouldn't have concentrated so fully on damaging each other. It would have been nice if the Post had focused on McCain more during that period, from a Democrat's POV.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786
when i started to read the summary, i thought that there was a REAL difference in coverage. it turns out that obama was covered only 20% or so more than mccain.
so THAT is the difference that can have any relevant impact on an election ? please. its not the hour of day for enduring bullshit, you should have waited until the evening to post the article.
Read radical news here
The insinuation isn't that McCain is an axe murderer.
Axe murderers are inherently bad things. There is little to no chance of having anything good to say about them. So most stories about axe murderers are negative. However, this isn't because of a "negative axe murderer bias". There are no positive stories reported because there is nothing positive to say. This is an example of a story that only has one side.
Like stories about axe murderers, maybe there was nothing positive to report on in the McCain campaign.
My twitter
You sound like an Obamaton.
Seriously.
And calling someone in politics for what, 10 years as qualified to lead the country, as well as taking the side of Biden, mr. technology himself, only proves my opinion.
Most of the people VOTING for Obama probably grew up around the same time his political carreer did.
--Toll_Free
Perhaps Obama got more attention in the media because of his skin color. I certainly hear mainstream media outlets mentioning it a lot. I think a lot of these people in the media are acting more racially biased by putting the spotlight on the fact that he's black. If they weren't racists, then his race wouldn't even be something thats brought up, and he wouldn't be getting so much attention in the media.
First of all, the number of articles is a bullshit metric. Who deserves more reporting: the 25-year veteran, well known to the public at large? Or the relative new-comer, who is the first ever serious black contender for the White House?
Second, if you believe there has ever been even a single example of bias-free reporting, you are seriously deluded. It comes with the territory, the territory being human communication.
The media should be restricted to unbiased reporting?
I can see half a dozen newspaper proprietors (eg Rupert Murdoch) having heart attacks if required to be unbiased.
The vast majority of the mainstream media does not have a strong ideological bias. Fox News would be the major exception to this. But all of the mainstream media (including Fox) have a corporate bias -- they are owned and controlled by media and industrial conglomerates who don't want bad press. They want ratings so they can make money from their customers (advertisers), and they don't want to offend their advertisers. So content-free he-said/she-said stories are ideal. They cost very little to produce, provide the illusion of fair and thoughtful coverage, and are perfect for easily producing sensationalist teasers and headlines (just take the most extreme claim by one side, twist it till it screams, and then rephrase it as a question: "Is Barack Obama a Socialist?"). Political stories are the best for this, since there are well-defined teams that can be easily riled up, and there is a constant stream of ridiculous accusations flying around during the now-never-ending campaign season. Sex and violence are close runners-up, since titillation, outrage and fear are also good motivators to get people to watch. So I think these media coverage statistics can be easily explained by the fact that Obama's campaign was largely about his biography and his agenda, and McCain's campaign was mostly accusations about Obama's biography and agenda. This resulted in a lot of easy (and easily sensationalized) stories about Obama. Add to this the difference in enthusiasm between Obama's supporters and McCain's, and the actual newsworthiness of his candidacy, and it shouldn't be surprising that he got more coverage.
I used to think the press was "liberal" but I don't think so anymore. These are people who would sell their own souls and their children just to scoop each other. It's all about sensationalism. Reporting on topics that are "liberal" causes controversy which creates a story. I really don't think they care enough about anything to promote an agenda. It's all about ratings and getting the story first.
Obama was a hot topic because he was the dark horse candidate--he was a greenhorn senator, the youngest candidate, left of center, and a black man. When this guy started getting the voters' attention, by virtue of his underdog status, he suddenly became "the story" to report. Obama went from being the "awe, how cute--he's running for president against the big dogs" story to the "holy crap, this guy really could win" story.
No matter what your political affiliation is, you have to admit that Obama's campaign and his victory are as remarkable as well as historic. Even if he ends up being the Calvin Coolidge or Andrew Johnson of this century, his election is already manifesting itself as a great healing to the wounds of racism in the United States. That alone is something MLK and his disciples could not do.
If the economy were in good shape, the wars were going well, and unemployment were low, I doubt as many Americans would have voted for the change Obama promised on the stump--if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Perhaps the Democrats do owe the victory to the media for reporting on the unraveling of those during Bush's tenure in the Oval Office.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Doesn't anyone else find it ironic that the party that believes businesses should be deregulated--so they can do what ever they need to do to earn a buck--is the very party that complains most about this industry we call the media be unfair to them? The media is just another industry. Who says they have to be fair or balanced? They are just doing what sells. From that party's point of view, what is wrong with that?
. . . the first African American major-party nominee . . .
Unless I've been under a rock for a long time, the Constitution of the United States requires that presidents be native American:
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President;
- Article II Section 1
Now I do work with a real African-American. He was born in Africa and immigrated to the United States of America when a teenager (who, by the way, is not eligible to be elected to the office of president). He's also a pasty white-boy.
All things considered, I think the phrase you meant to use is this:
. . . the first black major-party nominee . . .
Perhaps it's because Obama actually had something interesting to say. Something with a little thought behind it. Something that the other candidate did not. The Press is about giving coverage to news ... new developments, new ideas. If one candidate has something interesting to say, and the other does not, well you will get a bias. An unbiased Press is not necessarily about giving both candidates 50% page real estate and 50% of the positive stories.
[rant mode on]
And then there is Governor Palin. Articles about her were generally negative, but is that the fault of the Press? It beats me how anyone can write a positive article about someone that clueless. Someone who muffs interviews because she can't be bothered to prepare for them (against the advice of the campaign staff), and who has the brazen presumption to consider herself suitable for the office of VP or even the Presidency (in case her running mate suddenly retires for lack of a pulse) and doesn't know whether Africa is a country or a continent.
Some people might say that a VP candidate doesn't need to know one end of the world map from another (for the record, I disagree), so lets judge her on her professed area of competence. Our "energy expert" has this to say:
Ah right. Presiding over the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commissions counts as "working on energy independence"? And her "oversight" brought something to the table? *shrugs* And how about that claim of 20% of our energy production? Well, factcheck.org disagreed with our little "expert":
Right. Right. Mistaking 14% of our domestic energy production for 20% is all in a day's work. A detail. And confusing 20% of our domestic oil production with 20% of our energy production is something any "expert" would have trouble keeping apart, am I right? And mistaking 14% of our domestic oil production for 3.5% of our total energy production is another trivial mistake. Sheesh. I like it when a politician knows what he or she is talking about. Especially regarding "what she brings to the table".
Ah well ... perhaps I'm too gloomy. Perhaps I'm missing something. Some golden glimmer of insight somewhere in all gaffes. You never know. Only I wouldn't know how to write a positive article about that, but then I'm no trained journalist.
On the contrary. I'm biased against terminal ignorance. In students it's not that bad: they don't pretend to know it all and they are generally willing to learn. And they typically *do* learn before the end of term. Most of them.
Unfortunately politicians don't *have* to learn. For them it's an optional extra that takes valuable time from doing appearances. Some do learn (Governor Schwarzenegger for example). Some don't.
[rant mode off]
If the Democrats had nominated an old guy who'd been around forever and the Republicans had nominated someone fresh and dynamic whose candidacy was historic, the coverage disparity would have been the other way around. It's a mistake to say this is evidence of media liberal bias. Obama was simply more newsworthy and interesting.
I think one of the major differences are in the age of the voters. Obama appealed to younger voters. Those people have less invested in the current system and are more open to change as they have more to benefit and less to lose. If you are 18 or even in your 20s most likely you have not built up any considerable wealth. Those that are in their 40s and above have been working for a couple decades and possibly investing their money. Those people have a great deal to lose. They are also less likely to use the internet and cell phone technology. Hence they are considered unhip and out of touch. Obviously an important factor in being allowed to exist in this day and age. I'm feeling a bit of "Logan's Run" coming down the pike.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
If it bleeds, it leads as they say.
Except at Happy News. :o)
McCain is not an inherently bad person.
Being a Republican is not inherently bad.
It was media bias, plain and simple. You can try to justify it and be the apologist, but that does not change the facts.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Who says the reporting was showing popular sentiment? Did Nazi propaganda reflect German sentiment per-WWII? Or did it inflame what those controlling it wanted it to show? There, someone finally brought Nazis into the argument. This thread has covered all stereotypical views. :-D
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
Is this really a surprise, Obama had 8 (!) covers of TIME in 2008, 2 of which he shared with McCain. McCain had 1 cover that he didn't share. Call me crazy, but that's way over the line.
But this isn't anything new... Bill Clinton had 7 covers while campaigning for office, one of which he shared with Tsongas, another two with George H.W. Bush.
In THAT election, George H.W. Bush (a sitting President!) had exactly 1 cover, plus the two he shared with Clinton.
It's deja vu all over again!!
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
The media is certainly biased, but the real bias is not left or right but commercial. Media outlets are businesses and are biased toward whatever sells papers or advertising space. In this campaign, that was Obama. The right-wing outlets bashed him and the left-wing outlets praised him, but both gave him more coverage than his boring opponent, and as they say in Hollywood, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Just ask Ted Stevens, who won his senate seat despite being convicted of corruption just weeks before the election.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Obama is a prototypical tyrant/power abuser, like Clinton was.
He promises unrealistic things to manipulate other people.
George W. Bush dealt with hard realities and stabilized a nation. It's currently heresy to agree with that, and other people will try to use guilt and moderation points to intimidate you into agreeing.
However, the current economic mess is Clinton's legacy, not Bush's. There have been no terrorist attacks, and the police state people have been nattering about hasn't appeared.
History makes fools look like the dilettantes they are, and it will do the same for Obama: he was a media and popular darling among the uninformed, but is a fundamentally corrupt person with a very shady past and no tangible ideas, and he introduces America to the disorganization that will lead it to become a failed third-world state (as Spengler, Toynbee and Plato tell us).
The rest of the world is celebrating Obama from Schadenfreude, because they want to see the USA humbled and weakened.
Futurist Traditionalism
Maybe the press finally realized that just because Candidate A says the sky appears green, they don't have to report it when it's plain to see that the sky appears blue.
It may not be a sign of cowardice, but if done improperly it does invite attack.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
So from June 4 to Election Day, Obama had 51.73% of the stories, and McCain had 48.26% of the stories. That looks pretty damn even to me. Do you expect news agencies to count how many stories they have run in the past and use that to set some sort of quota?
"Well, Obama did get a crowd of 200,000 people in Germany for his speech, which is pretty big news... but he's currently 3 news stories over quota, so we're going to have to not report that one." And not all the news was fluffy either. There were the stories about Rev Wright, and Obama going to a Madrassa in Indonesia for example that everyone ran with. Those were legitimate things to report (and investigate, and then retract). If the media didn't cover those stories, people would have been up and arms over that as well.
McCain was simply a known entity and there was very little exploring done in his background. Even up to election day, despite all the media coverage and longest election race in history, people were still claiming that they didn't know who Obama was. That alone I think justifies the slight disparity in news coverage, as it's the media's responsibility to help investigate and explain to voters Obama's background. No such intense scrutiny was needed for McCain, and people didn't ask for it.
I think McCain/Palin's campaign was one of the hardest ones to actually agree with, also considering the Bush factors, I'd say this was all an attempt from the press to avoid looking like a bunch of idiots. I don't blame them.
Regarding comedy/satire, McCain and specially Palin are really, really fun to mock, and mocking them equals better rating, Another part in which I can't blame them either.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Actually, it's not. To be responsible for something is precisely to be answerable for it.
Why isn't anyone reporting on his White-ness?
He IS half white. He is in not a black man.. he is a half black man AS WELL AS a half white man.
"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end"
What was the press tone like in 04? 00? They leaned Bush. Because that's where the compelling story was. It's not got to do anything with liberal or conservative media bias. It's easy to do a story on Obama. Play a clip of sarah palin going, "Who is barack obama?" then go into his memoir, or audacity of hope. McCain on the other hand, kept making "Oh, Grandpa" moves and well, Sarah Palin... Joe Biden was a gaffe machine but he knew what the President of the senate means. The things that came out of his mouth were just hillarious, not ridiculously retarded.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
As opposed to a fair number of articles both glorifying and demonizing a single ethnic group that ignored the issues to make history in a Guiness Book of World Records type stunt. Woo hoo!!1 First Black President! Now lets see if we can get the most people ever assembled to eat as many hot dogs as possible!!1one!!
They should check the number of McCain/Palin vs. Obama/Biden. Palin had much more press than Biden.
I opened this thread expecting one thing: to see a bunch of replies saying, in a nutshell, "It isn't biased if it is true." Pretty much what I am seeing here. Obama is the most unvetted President in recent history, and you all know it. The media didn't investigate because they didn't want to. We all know, however, how much Palin spent on clothes and that a plumber in Toledo doesn't have a license.
Of course the news favored a young black man over and old white man. Its always like that on tv. Don't you ever watch cops?
Why is this important? Cui bono? Because there is a religion of the state and a cult of citizenry.
Fortunately, comedy is one of the better ways of commentary our Free Speech system has... shows like Saterday Night Live were pretty quick to point out all the problems in reporting, along with the exagerated, but generally true problems with all the canidates...
I find what wasn't reported more interesting then what was. Many people still don't even know that Obama has a lawsuit against him in the Supreme Court.
Or that when Obama went to visit his grandmother on Oct 21, he had a lawsuit pending against him in Hawaii.
Maybe we should take a second and read what the Middle East thinks of Obama.
"But we were taken by surprise when our African Kenyan brother [Obama], who is an American national, made statements that shocked all his supporters in the Arab world, in Africa, and in the Islamic world.
"We hope that this is merely an elections 'clearance sale,' as they say in Egypt - in other words, merely an elections lie.
So what was it that Obama lied about to his Arab, African and Islamic brothers?
You all may call me a conspiracy theorist, and maybe I am, but my world is sure a lot more exciting. Even if these clams are extreme, aren't they at least worth looking in to? I mean, if they're false then why would supporters even care that we do?
"...horse races sell money." You raise a good point. The emphasis on this story was the "Obama tilt," but down in the third paragraph, I find the statistic of "1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories" even more troubling.
What the hell are you talking about? How is the internet "worse" than TV and newspapers?
You do realize how silly and paranoid you sound, do you?
The basic business model of a newspaper (and a commercial TV channel) is to sell advertising space. Once you fix that firmly in your mind things make a lot more sense.
Newspapers require journalists to write stories that will make people buy papers. Sometimes they might be some public good (Watergate). Often times it will be utter drivel (almost anything about Britney Spears). As long as the stories fit the business model (serious investigative reporting, celebrity trash and anything inbetween) then it's all good.
It gives the 4th estate too much credit to think they are particulary political. Fox hammer the conservative message because their business model is to attract conservative politics lovers/haters to Fox. Their perceived politics is just part of the business plan.
Obama is popular - therefore newsworthy - so stories about him will sell.
McCain is less popular and in many respects less newsworthy (his politics and personal life are well known now, and wealthy old white male politicians aren't scarce on the ground) so stories are not going to sell as many papers.
Long story short - media don't exist to help voters make informed choices; they exist to make money. That ambitious politicians and their campaign teams use this to their advantage should also not be a surprise.
echo $SIGNATURE
I detect no bias here. All is objective and fair. Fox News is biased, we know, but CNN is objective. Isn't this obvious to everyone?
You forget... McCain "suspended" his campaign. That's half the difference right there.
Besides, the paper may have given an edge to one candidate for coverage, but Letterman had a lot more coverage of McCain than he did Obama...
I remember during the week of the Republican national convention, one day I looked at the Daily Oklahoman front page and there was nothing on there about the convention. Instead there was an article about Hillary drumming up more support for Obama.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"Drug use" would not be seen as a problem. ALL of us use drugs. The only difference is that the government approves of some of those drugs (alcohol, caffeine, etc.) but not others (cocaine, marijuana, etc.)
A much bigger problem is Obama's long track record of shredding Constitutionally guaranteed rights as a senator . . and his announced intention of doing so even further. Not that the Repugs have been/would be much if any better.
But the biggest problem by far is not them, but us. It is that we as a nation were willing to elect anyone, of either party, who has amply demonstrated his or her willingness to violate the very rights they are sworn to protect. It is our willingness to give up liberty in exchange for the illusory promise of "security" or "prosperity" or anything else. Without liberty there can be neither of those things in the first place. What has made our nation weak, sick, vulnerable, and poor is the fact that we allow and even insist that others rule over and provide for us, rather than each of us ruling and providing for ourselves and our own loved ones. Until that changes, we can only expect things to get worse, not better, regardless of who is elected, and regardless of how many non-government-approved drugs he or she did or did not ingest.
Nonaggression works!
I think another factor that needs to be considered is all the screw-ups by the Republican ticket: the Katie Couric interview, the fundamentals of the economy are strong, not knowing what the job of the VP is, the illegal abuse of power. Even Fox News and Karl Rove agreed that Obama ran a nearly flawless campaign. There was simply less fodder for Obama.
Reality has a clear liberal bias. There's nothing wrong with the media portraying both candidates realistically. That meant that they talked more about McCain's negatives than Obama's, because Mcain is a vapid know-nothing with no real ideas.
BTW, there's absolutely nothing wrong with ignoring Obama's teenage drug use as it is irrelevant. The media also ignored Cindy McCain's more recent drug use (including prescription fraud that would send a less fortunate person to jail) and McCain's poor performance in the Naval Academy and throughout his military career.
Funny how nobody has stopped to ask... but WTF is this story doing on Slashdot? If I wanted useless partisan bickering over a news story (about news stories) I would go to Yahoo's message boards.
Oh wait, even they figured out that hosting an open forum on the Internet about politics is like giving angry monkeys a bucket of poop. That's why there's no more comments section on articles.
"News for nerds." Let's stick with that.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
If I had mod points i'd give you +1 insightful.
If life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are truly inalienable rights (incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred), then it seems to follow that the responsibility for using and maintaining these rights should also lie with the individual.
So to take what you said about the television media and society one step further, it follows that "we the people" have already ceded our responsibility to maintaining our "inalienable" rights to the government. Otherwise wouldn't there be some TV networks that focus on the rights and responsibility of the individual, instead of the idea that the government should be solving all our problems?
It's pretty much been common knowledge for the past 2 years that this race would belong to someone from the Democratic party. The article should have compared Hillary Clinton's coverage up until the time Obama got the nomination.
-- Boycott Shell
you mean like all the biased reporting regarding windows? well I guess since it is the best operating system and it won then I guess looking back at the bias is kinda pointless. As would pointing out any problems with windows or any misrepresentations made by microsoft. It sure is great to live in a country that has a free press! that is unless you factor in the advertisers....
Of the old media, newspapers are the best. You can get right and left versions, and you will usually find the info they would rather hide buried at the end of the 3rd continuation of the article on page 25. There is still some remnant of journalistic integrity.
TV, by its very nature, can only present a tiny slice of information. So the reporter has to be highly selective in what information he presents. The selection process is highly biased, no matter how objective the reporter tries to be. And these days, they don't try. So it is nearly impossible to get a non-misleading snapshot of events from TV, whether Fox or NBC. And then there are the outright fabrications (CBS).
I dropped newspapers because it was more trouble to chase down the crucial facts they try to hide (but feel compelled to include somewhere) than it was to google for opposing views. When google figures out how to politically bias search results (if they haven't already), then we are really in trouble.
Oh for the *really* old media (1960), where reporters were determined to get to the bottom of a story, and looked for the dirt on *all* the candidates. Or maybe that picture was fabricated by Hollywood. I wasn't alive back then.
Care to share how conflicts are started by leaders who are apologetic?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Obama ran a nearly flawless campaign? Obama was the best choice? Obama represents change?
You mean the media ran the flawless campaign for him and it was glaringly obvious.
You mean Obama is the worst choice now or ever and the only change will be a rollback of whats worked these last 8 years i.e. unilateral pursuit of al qaeda, less taxation.
What has not worked, allowing the Democrats the fannie and freddie disaster, it lays at their feet to a vast majority!
If the media would have presented obamas negatives in any meaningful detail and on parity with the vetting mccain-palin received, Obama would have been done and gone long ago but not, he's black so he gets a pass on associating with domestic terrorists, race hate mongers, chicago corrupt machine politics and the cronyism/favortism he received, his voting record, less experience than the gop veep candidate and the most obvious, the current credit/financial crisis and his ties to it along with his partiess ties to it via Fannie and Freddie.
Stupidity prevailed on November 4 and you got exactly the govt you deserve you fucking idiots.
You may want to stock up on canned food!
Michael S. Malone wrote a while ago about the media bias during this campaign. Did you hear about it in the major media? Gee, why not? He writes now about "My Own Personal Media Bubble"
... something like "There is class warfare alright, and my class is winning."
Stick that red-baiting up yours.
/ (very) small biz owner
Not only were they unlikely to run a positive story on McCain...
Or maybe there weren't many positive stories to run about the McCain campaign. That is possible you know. Perhaps if McCain and Palin spent less time trying to hint that Obama was a terrorist and more time on actual policy differences from the current administration there would have been more positive to talk about. We're had 8 years of what most people regard as very poor republican leadership. McCain needed to distance himself from that which was going to be very hard for any republican. Instead he pandered to the republican base and muddled his message.
...in all fairness McCain had lots of positive messages but they were flatly refused to be reported.
John McCain did have some decent ideas on policy but the campaign was too busy pandering to the right and trying to smear Obama's character. Their "joe the plumber" meme was a vague and condescending attempt at populism. They couldn't keep a consistent message and really stumbled on the economy. There are a LOT of serious problem right now. Two wars, an economy in serious trouble, deeply unpopular international policies, etc. The McCain/Palin campaign wasted our time trying to brand Obama as a terrorist instead of really talking about serious problems and how they would do it differently than the current administration.
McCain is a good man and I actually respect him a lot but he ran a shitty campaign and chose a VERY questionable VP. My concerns weren't with him specifically but with the people he would likely appoint and the Palin selection pretty much confirmed my worries. With all the problems in the last 8 years under a republican administration any republican was a long shot to win even with a perfectly executed campaign and his was anything but perfect.
This is one of those article that falls victim to the old logical trap.
Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain
CLEARLY that must have been because of bias. Or, at the very least, that "journalists love the new, and McCain was old." It could not have been random or, dare I say it, because Obama was actually the bigger story more often.
This thread is now officially closed, and Chrisq has lost the argument.
You may return to your regular flame-throwing.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
...have a liberal bias.
Really, this story should be tagged "sourgrapes".
There was very little McCain/Palin bashing from the campaign.
Yeah, they didn't have to get their hands dirty because everyone else was doing it for them. Every outlet on the internet was doing the bashing/satire/slander on McCain/Palin. Every news network was dispatching people to dig up dirt on Palin while ignoring any on Obama.
It's easy to take the high ground when everyone is doing your dirty work for you.
Suddenly, I'm no longer so sure that absolute freedom of the press is such a good idea any more.
This comment almost makes me sick to my stomach. It's unbelievable the degree to which some Americans have allowed their ideological filter to dominate their thoughts. I can't believe anyone would think that we should limit our Constitutional freedoms simply because you don't like what you hear. I hope to God you don't consider yourself "conservative" or "republican" with an attitude like that.
Is democracy a viable form of government if voter opinions are so readily influenced and shaped by the media?
Are you so sure that the chicken came before the egg? Perhaps some self-reflection and humility is in order. When the entire world disagrees with you, perhaps it's worth considering that the entire world might not be the mistaken party. Or do you believe that you alone among mankind are free from influence and bias?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
that his friendship with admitted left-wing terrorists is "a lie"??
Not only is it not a lie, it has been proven true.
Try the same experiment after the Jefferson trials ends. Aside from which, you're getting all the articles about the two. You should be limiting your numbers to ones that mention their respective crimes.
Also, search for all dates rather than the current news and watch what happens to the Obama/Rezko number of stories. (Hint, it involves an additional 2,600+ stories while the same for Palin involves an additional 50 stories.) You're missing quite a few stories that haven't happened in the last month.
Part of the reason that the Obama/Rezko connection isn't big news now is that it has been fairly exhaustively covered in the past few years. It isn't new.
Aside from which, I don't know that the Rezko connection is really equivalent to Trooper-Gate. One of those stories involves allegations of abuse of power of executive office, the other does not. A better comparison would be between Obama/Rezko (or better yet Ayers) and Palin/Alaskan Independence Pary.
Yes, the First Amendment gives you the right to say almost anything you care to. Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is an example of something the First Amendment does not give you the right to do.
Actually, it does give you the right to say this. What it does not do is shield you from the inevitable charges of falsely inciting a panic.
Free speech must, in any truly free society, be held as absolute and sacrosanct. This does not, however, mean that people should not be responsible for the consequences of their actions and choices; it only means that speech itself must never be a crime.
Why do so many Americans love their guns but complain that the free press is, well, free to do what it wants.
Perhaps we could make a deal, give up free press AND the right to expression and give up guns.
Not so attractive a proposition is it?
Reality has a well-known liberal bias. (Thank you once more, Mr. Colbert.)
I'm confused. They only talk about 2 candidates in the article. What about Nader? Wasn't he underrepresented?
And I thought I saw half a dozen other candidates when I glanced at the ballot. What about them? Why didn't the press cover them equally?
Waaaaah.
Yes, you're answerable if you're responsible, but that's not the issue.
No one can force you to be responsible, in the same way that no one can force you to be happy, or sad, or hungry. When you're forced to say or do something, you're being compliant. In fact, you're relieved of any responsibility, because you're following orders.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
I'm generally bothered when folks trot out statistics claiming that the news media ran more negative articles/clips on one side of an argument than the other, and thus is hopelessly biased. What law of nature says that "fair" coverage has to have a balance between positive and negative for the two sides? If one side strays farther from reality on verifiable, important things, the news media should call them on that. The media shouldn't pick a side a priori, but it also has a responsibility to speak up when the facts are clear (which, admittedly, they aren't always).
That said, I'm not going to argue that there is no bias in the media, nor that the recent election cycle was completely fair. If nothing else, Obama had a huge structural advantage in news coverage because he was vastly "newer" in numerous different ways. I'm sure the personal views of the news staff play some role as well. This study of the Washington Post is unusually comprehensive and interesting.
The above should be taken as a more general rant about this kind of tit-for-tat comparison, whether trotted out by Fox News to attack the "liberal media" or in "balanced" science pieces where a crackpot gets as much airtime as legitimate science. I just don't find this general metric for judging bias particularly compelling.
Another way of looking at it:
Obama spent most of his energy, ad money, and speeches focusing on himself (and his vague policies.)
McCain spent most of his energy, ad money, and speeches focusing on Obama.
So even the McCain campaign was biased.
-- QED
Will be creating an account later after work.
Just had to say congratulations to the folks who voted Obama in. Yes, you got your first black president, and you also elected in a man whose relative(aunt) is in the country illegally and is living off our welfare for the past 5 Yrs. Here is one of the links, it was originally posted by the AP News.http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=38607
umm...actually wasn't the Media complaining that the McCain group was limiting their access, they complained (loudly) that they could't even get access to Palin.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/23/media-presses-mccain-campaign-for-access-to-palin-meeting/
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2008/08/09/mccain_limits_media_access.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/john-mccain-onc.html
http://www.jedreport.com/2008/08/mccains-new-pre.html
that was a 1 minute google for "media + mccain + no access", try googling "no access to palin."
If you were a political journalist (and were required to write something..) would you continue wasting your time trying to gain access to someone who obviously doesn't want to speak with you? If there was a lack of media coverage, it was McCain's own fault.
The "Fairness Doctrine" was shown to the door by the Reagan Administration. The news organizations do not have a responsibility to be unbiased.
-- QED
Well, there was some bias, no doubt but I think most of the bias is actually that McCain just ran a more negative campaign and Obama's race was a positive factor in reporting on his campaign.
Well, there has always been a liberal bias, but for the most part reporters tried to be objective even if it bled through sometimes.
Then the GOP and Fox News created a war on "the liberal news". Fox News was more bias than anything before it and eventually MSNBC responded by making their network blatantly bias, like Fox News.
Other networks try to be fair, even if they have more liberal people on their network. I think it's fine to have bias news networks, however it's not really fine to call yourself "fair and balanced" when you're obviously the most biased news station on TV. Also I find MSNBC isn't too bad unless your watching hardball/maddow/olbermann. Fox News on the other hand is almost always bias. Fox and Friends was insane the last couple days of the election.
Same Old White Dude
or
New Young Black Dude
?
I'm not sure I understand the logic - would you say that I have a right to rob someone, for instance, even though I'm not shielded from the criminal penalties?
There's a difference between the ideal and the practical, and the Founders recognized that. The Supreme Court does place limits on free speech - see the Wikipedia articles here and here.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
I don't understand this at all. Whoever said that "The Press" is supposed to be unbiased? The whole idea is that you choose what you want to read. If you want to get an unbiased view, then read a mix of press. Have people stopped thinking all together?
Wahington Post looks in the mirror, attacks self for unfair liberal bias; denies existence of free will.
Sorry if I'm not impressed.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
Media bias is entirely perception and common sense. While news organizations call themselves "fair and balanced" its usually not the case, even when reporting 'just facts'.
We should be expecting the same bias we see on FoxNews or MSNBC as we do on Slashdot. We know where our source of information comes from.
The thing is people are much more intelligent then that, they will automatically gravitate to news sources and sites that share their common 'bias' or perspective. Just look at the massive drop in hits Slashdot is getting recently, its a shift of sentiment
You're information is only partially accurate. The "birth certificate" you are talking about probably is the one posted on factcheck.org. This isn't even a birth certificate, but a Certificate of Living Birth, which does not provide proof of citizenship and is not a Certificate of Live Birth (which is the actual birth certificate). That point has confused a lot of people.
On Oct 31, hawaiian officials have refuted the images posted on the web by the Obama campain, and factcheck.org. What they confirmed is that a birth certificate does exist, but they still refuse to release what information it has about Obama's citizenship, etc.
Obama did lie and post false information on the internet about his identity. That isn't conspiracy theory. So what else has Obama lied about?
Oh, and again. If you really think that I've lost my mind, and that it's just manure rolled over, then why does it bother you?
I will never understand americans. Now they want to believe Obama stole THIS election but, on the other hand, Bush's elections where perfectly OK?
Americans: its time to throw the KKK rags to the recycle bin.
NO SIG
Not quite true. McCain and Obama both said, during the primaries before either was nominated (or the front-runner), that they would limit themselves to public financing, $85 million each, if their opponent did as well. When McCain sewed up the nomination, he pressed Obama, who had begun his inch towards the nomination. His campaign had also become a cash cow. Obama reneged. So, McCain declined the public limits, too.
MSNBC story from Feb. about this.
End result, instead of $170 million spent between the two, it was more like $1000 million ($630 million for Obama, $360 for McCain).
Source for the spending totals, they were tough to find.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Sure I believe there were more Obama stories than McCain...but does this count Palin stories in the McCain side?
Just visiting republican blogs throughout the campaign like HotAir.com, I found it interesting that on their main page there were more pictures of Palin than McCain. Whenever McCain would be in a picture, he would be in the background and Palin in the foreground. Sometimes he was even out of focus.
The rest of the time Obama seemed to dominate the stories rather than McCain. So yeah, Obama had more stories because McCain wasn't a story. He was more just in the way.
McCain ran a very mediocre campaign and struggled to connect with the republican base. Obama ran a top-notch campaign and had his base really fired up. The press coverage simply reflected these facts.
Parent probably meant Keith Olbermann.
Come on -really??? And we know who the dog is here, with that shiver going up Chris Matthews leg and Keith Olbermann practically wetting himself from excitement. The press is a disgrace.
Preposterous! Are you suggesting that things are just as they seem? That McCain's loss can be attributed to something as simple as incompetence and that the press is in fact not controlled by, say, a shadowy cabal of pink ferrets?? Heresy! Appalling!
Liberal bias? I suppose you could call it that, although I find that what most conservatives call a 'liberal bias', translates into 'biased toward honesty'. They seem to have problems with stories that report facts that invalidate their worldview. In the specific case of Obama, OF COURSE THERE IS A BIAS. Republicans are pretty unpopular these days. When republicans are reviled, it stands to reason that the dems are going to get better press.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I wasn't justifying anything. I was just explaining the analogy, since you seem to believe that he was saying that McCain was an axe murderer.
And I never said that McCain or Republicans were bad, nor implied it.
My twitter
So 81% of journalist, you know, the people who's job is to gain knowledge about what's happening in the world and report it, vote democrat. There was a slashdot article earlier this year that had a breakdown of economists political views. I can't remember the exact number, but a similar majority of them supported democrats as well. This is totally my bias speaking here, but maybe educated people are biased towards the left because they actually know that it is better for the country. I am biased, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
whil marijuana should be legal, and the psyhedelics (because they aren't addictive), there is a subset of highly addictive AND highly inebriating (nicotine: highly addictive, not highly inebriating) which should and forever more be made illegal by any society that values freedom. i'm tlaking about cocaine, heroin, meth, etc.
for two reasons:
1. addiction to a highly addictve substanc eis a grater impediment on your freedom than the most brutal prison in the most fascist authoritarian dream. well, not ture... such a regime could addict you to heroin, as the ultimate form of freedom destruction
2. addicts to highly addictive, highly inebriating drugs function (or rather, don't function) with a huge impediment on their ability to hold a job, have a relationship, etc. such that they become wards fo the state, they become poor, they thieve to suppor their habit. a large number of drug addicts in your society is a huge impediment on your freedom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So you got rid of the TV and the newspaper but kept the internet, the best of the three?
Fixed that typo for you, It may surprise you, but the internet is by far the best source of "news" in existence. Among other things, you get access to scholarly articles and international news. The quality of the information ranges from the worst imaginable to the best you can get without hitting a library. The problem is seperating out the chaff.
It wasn't an issue of "balance", the Obama visit was simply the bigger story.
And generally, Obama was a far bigger story than McCain. I mean, "My God, our next president may well be an elderly white man who married into money! Who'd have ever thought that such a thing could happen!" honestly doesn't make for such an interesting news discussion.
If journalists were discussing the potential significance of someone with Obama's background becoming president, it was difficult not to be positive. It was difficult to think of as much positive material relating to the idea of someone with McCain's background becoming president.
So Obama's campaign won a lot of positive news coverage by providing news stories that were difficult not to cover positively.
Where the situations were reversed was with the choice of VP. Biden was a hellishly boring VP candidate, and consequently didn't get much coverage. Old white guy with worthy credentials and a lot of tedious experience. Snore. Nothing to see, move along.
McCain OTOH deliberately chose an "exiting" VP candidate, and consequently got huge amounts of media coverage off the back of it.
Unfortunately for the McCain camp, there was a lot more to say about Palin that was potentially negative than potentially positive, and even a lot of republicans winced at the idea of "President Palin", because the person honestly didn't seem to know enough to be considered presidential material. And Palin seemed to love the attention - the McCain people couldn't complain that news people were putting undue emphasis on Palin, because that's why McCain chose Palin - to get headlines and try to stir up some excitement. But other than McCain himself, it was difficult to find anyone in the Republican Party with any experience who was prepared to stand in front of a camera and declare that they thought that Palin would actually be a competent President if anything should happen to McCain. So that then generated a further tendency for negative stories about the McCain campaign compared to the Obama campaign, and that in turn generated discussions about the relative judgement of the two candidates, since Obama was generally considered to have run an excellent campaign despite his relative inexperience, and since McCain seemed to have made at least one critical error, in his VP choice.
If that was the situation, then reporters were obliged to report on it. They weren't obliged to try to impose a corrective bias onto the news in order to force an artificial 50:50 balance in airtime, if the available stories and information didn't justify that balance.
Eric Baird
That is a sad rebuttal. Before you try and goose me, I didn't vote. McCain is about as mentally capable of running the county as Dwight Schrute. You over zealous stereotyping side-swipes the argument.
Actually I think it's illegal in all States to release personal documents of that kind. The point, which you so cleverly didn't address, is that Obama lied and posted false information about himself. I'm not the one posting half truths or opinions. I have presented current information, and asked readers to judge for themselves.
To bring this back to the original article, media bias doesn't only exist in what is reported, but also what isn't. Legal precedings, personal affiliations and more were never reported. I don't care so much that Obama had x more articles, or front page articles. If that's what people are relying on to get the "fair" coverage they want, then the Country is already in a mess. What is more important is that the information is true, unbiased and without reporter opinion.
Obama is a better, fresher rubject for not only the USA' future, but the majority of the rest of the world expqessed relhef or optimism. That is quite telling. Also, Obama was calmer and less hostile more often than his formdr opponent. McCain doomed his campaign with a stunningly, supremely heavy albatross of an exquisitly poorly vetted running mate, probably to suckle up to the women who favored Hillary, who mostly voted that Palin was no friend of theirs. And, Whites made this change work.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Until this past October I would have agreed with you that calling NPR biased towards "liberal" was unreasonable.
But then I went to a live taping of NPR's version of the Daily Show: "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me". This was the week of the VP debate, so politics was foremost in most of their comments. I noticed the following:
1 ) The comments the cast makes are more liberal than those that make it into the show. They cut out the more extreme/non-PC/malicious comments.
2 ) There was not a single person on stage that would consider themselves a conservative based on their comments.
3 ) The audience was OVERWHELMINGLY liberal, based on their responses to the cast. (Clapping, cat-calls, boos)
4 ) The moderator asked the crowd afterwards if they were being too hard on Palin. The entire crowd yelled out "no".
I'm using part-to-whole logic here, but this experience really makes it hard to beleive that the rest of NPR is un-biased.
If the people that listen to NPR are mostly liberal, than you can understand why the NPR managers would want to give them more "liberal" programming: It's what their listeners want.
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
...and you have a whole lot of BS here.
If you care about the health of our democracy we better hope that the media does not treat Obama with kid gloves here on out, and end up becoming state press.
The one and only time Obama got a free pass from the media was early in the primaries - ask any Edwards supporter. But that all changed when he passed Hillary Clinton, at which point the majority of coverage switched to Concern Trolling (white working class voters) or outright negativity (Rev. Wright). This is because 1) the media loves a horse race (more ad $$$), and 2) is obsessed with balance, faking it if necessary. Like how Mareen Dowd liked the Monica Lewinski scandal to Bush's war crimes - they aren't on the same planet, much less the same page.
I am quite upset that the WashPost did not add too and complete its story on the Barack Obama campaign credit card donation fraud.
Were you as Concerned about low income McCain voters suddenly making maximum donations to his campaign earlier this year?
I provided evidence in the form of bank statements, screen shots, etc and was speaking directly to the reporter who wrote the article.
Can you provide any evidence that Obama is beholden to any group with an average donation of $86, despite raising hundreds of millions of dollars?
Additionally, if BHO and his Democratic allies have their way, the voice of the conservatives on the AM dial will be squelched.
Liar. Even if the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated (and Obama has made no statements to support that) it wont force Limbaugh or Savage or Hannity or Hack $X off the air, it will just force the stations to carry an opposing view. It's telling that wingnuts are terrified of the prospect of a level playing field.
I thought that one of the first things you learn in Journalism is to be objective when reporting the news. I barely saw that element throughout the whole political coverage. People were so much tougher on McCain when asking him about issues than they were about Obama. It's almost as if people were afraid of making him mad. Also, I didn't think it was right seeing journalists cry when reporting that Obama won. While I realize that it was an historic moment for the country, journalists are supposed to, again, remain objective. Yes, we're all human and we're all emotional, but I don't like turning on the TV and watching someone report the news with such a bias for the candidate he obviously wanted to win. I really don't think that there are any TV outlets (or newspapers for that matter) that are unbiased. They always seem to lean one way. How are people supposed to make an informative decision if people are telling them to go in a certain direction?
Depends. Responsible is actually a rather ambiguous term. I can be termed responsible for a traffic accident that I caused, yet not be accountable for it b/c no one else is aware I caused it. I can be termed responsible for the results of a project I manage, and held accountable (be answerable) if those results are not correct, even though I had little direct control over the final product my developers release. I am responsible for my own diet, yet I do not answer to anyone for it.
English is such a fun language.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
if you work in the media, say as a reporter, your job is to go out and gather information. gathering information leads to left-leaning opinions, simply out of acceptance of the definition of the concepts of liberalism and conservativism:
a liberal approach to life is one which goes out and seeks strange and different and new things. a conservative approach to life walls one off from change, purposefully shuts one in and denies new stimuli. tradition is favored
so working in the media would tend to shape someone as liberal. that is, working in the media is not something sought out by liberals, and therefore their ideology is reflected in their work, but rather, if you took a group of 10 people, conservativ,e liberal, moderate, whatever, and revisited them in 10 years, every one in the group would have shifted leftward ideologically
simply because the nature of their job forces them to go out and interview people they would never have normally associated with, involve themselves with events they would have otherwise shunned, go to places they would otherwise avoid, etc. in other words, to live the life of a liberal thinker. the nature of media work, reporting, forces you to engage in a liberal attitude towards life by going out and seeing and feeling new and different and alien things
meanwhile, conservative opinion is good for government mouthpieces and propaganda, statements of reaction, stasis, resistance to change: stubbornly walling the status quo off from challenges to the established way of thinking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
First of all... McCain ran just a horrible, attrocious campaign. So... is the press not supposed to reflect that?
Second of all... lets say the rightwing extremists get their way (as they have for the past 30 years), and instead of reporting accurately on McCain's lies and "errors" of ommission and gaffs etc etc,... they instead "balance" the news out so there is equally favorable reporting for both candidates. Wouldn't THAT be the very definition of an unfair bias?
The far right has had their lackey press polishing their turds for over a decade... and now they are whining that America has become sick and tired of their lies and denial of reality.
America has already answered the far right: over 370 electoral votes have heard their conserns, and said "so what". Time for the Republicans to practice what they preach: it's going to be treasonous and America-hating to disagree with Teh President during a Time Of War (tm).
Obama has a clear mandate, and a whole lot of political capital. Far more than GWB, n who lost the 2000 election by at least a half million votes (and under a huge cloud of vote fraud and blatant misconduct by the SCOTUS). Time for the Republicans to "put aside partisanship", aka doing exactly what the Democratic party tells you to. Because that's the role you guys said the minority party was supposed to play, remember?
Lets see here.... they get complaints that they favor one candidate, but they don't check, and if necessary correct their mistake, until after the election is over. This gave more attention to one candidate throughout the campaign. After the election is over they check what several people have obviously been claiming for a while (if a significant number hadn't claimed it, the paper wouldn't have spent time to check) and discover they did favor a candidate that, coincidentally, will take office next year. Oh, oops. I am not saying something as stupid as they are responsible for Obama's victory, but extra publicity from a major news paper won't hurt if a candidate is trying to get in the public's eye. The fact that they didn't check their bias until after the election reflects poorly on the paper, IMHO.
So, when the numbers agree with you then the numbers are correct.
But when the numbers contradict you, well, everyone knows you cannot trust the numbers anyway.
And I recommend that you stick to that rationalization.
The ONLY reason that Republicans rant against "the MSM" is because they want to control the messages that their followers hear and believe. And, if possible, what everyone else hears and believes as well.
The fact is that MOST of the people in the country did NOT care about Rezko. They were worried about losing their homes and their jobs and their savings.
Then they hear a story about some guy losing his job because he stood up for some guy that Palin wanted fired.
THAT resonates with the people already worried about THEIR jobs. A lot more than "Joe the Plumber" crying about the possibility of paying higher taxes on a quarter million dollars that he does NOT have yet.
AND the Obama campaign STILL did not make an issue of it.
Quite unlike McCain's strategy of "guilt by association" smears.
The media does have a bias but it is towards the more interesting candidate. The press gave Bush a pass for years until popular sentiment turned against him. Then it became more "profit-worthy" to report the scandals and mis-steps of the administration. Palin was more interesting than McCain and received more airtime than he did after she was selected as a VP candidate. The press may not have discussed Obama's past drug use but they also avoided McCain's involvement with the Keating 5 to a large degree while they talked about Bill Ayers obsessively. They avoided Bush's drug use and alcoholism when he was running for President also. The "liberal media bias" BS is a cop out for sore losers. It's a tactic to cast blanket doubt on whatever the media reports on and has been used since Nixon. It's a very convenient way to discard anything negative said in the press. I think instead of blaming the press, mud slinging, and suppressing voters the Republicans should actually focus on policy. Maybe people would actually support them if their whole platform wasn't entirely based on social issues and character assasination. The country is in bad shape and people want answers not excuses.
Time makes more converts than reason
Despite McCain's longer record and having "more scars", picking Palin, letting her go rogue, and losing his cool --if there ever was any left-- were tantamount to death by a thousand cuts, 998, 999, and 1,000, sandwiched between 997 1,001+ when saying dumb shht like the US might be/have to stay in Iraq at least a hundred years. Most rational, sane people neither WANT nor want to HEAR that. Now, if Obama's team proves stellarly fit for the upcoming work, they may obsolete mil duty as a qual.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
When the other candidate is such a piece of crap, accurate reporting will show the "favored" candidate is better.
Of course, the Washington Post is so invested in corporate Republican politics that it is undermining Obama with this story, now that Obama is going to be in charge. The WP could have run this analysis any time during the campaign season, and changed its ways, if they were indeed showing bias. But instead, they're just lying now, because their favoritism of McCain didn't quite work.
"Reality has a well known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert
--
make install -not war
In other news, the press favors chocolate over brain cancer.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
> and total disregard for problems such as his drug use.
Say what?
Which, I suppose, is evidence itself that there's a problem.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
McCain's campaign was poorly run and much more negative than Obama's. Between his pick of Palin for VP, his suspended campaign stunt, and all of the negative campaigning (Ayers, ACORN, Socialist, etc.), I'm not surprised he got so much bad press. And are you really surprised Obama got such good press? He's charismatic with many, many loyal followers who got out the vote for him. Simply covering that story would get him more good press than McCain.
I for one am sorry to hear this. I think Obama could have won without any bias, maybe even with a small bias against him. He has the right ideas and McCain's campaign was a joke. God help us if a woman like Palin ever wins high office. That said, one of the early posters made a good point - these statistics were just for one paper. I'm sure that, depending on the media market, different papers were biased in different directions. I doubt you found a lot of glowing reportage on Obama in Mississippi or Alabama! And New York was going for Obama no matter what. So maybe over all there was some balance, and maybe the bias wasn't so great that it actually swung the election. After all, after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, the challenger (Democrat) should have won by a landslide, not the average margin that Obama received!
They also heavily favored Palin over Biden. So obviously they have a conservative bias. Or perhaps they just liked reporting on new and interesting people, rather than boring old white men.
I guess it's easy to talk about that MSM liberal bias. But my guess is that Fox News reported more on Obama/Palin than McCain/Biden also.
since the contest for the Dem's candidate wasn't decided for 3 months and it was hard fought contest naturally there would be more stories. For three months the only real activity from McCain was "elect me or one of those two will get in"
No New Content = No New Stories.
Political opinions aside if your content isn't fresh you don't get press.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
As one who makes a living on Comca$t & Time Warner subscriptions, a democratic victory was very important for our bottom line. We live or die based on our audience & that audience wants democratic coverage. Unfortunately our audience is not the entire population. Fortunately, the rest of U tend to do what you're told.
McCain got a lot more articles than McKinney or Barr or Nader. If you want more balanced media coverage, where do you draw the line? A "fair" media need only give you equal coverage if the name of your party is "Republican" or "Democrat"?
I'd be interested to see if the Freakonomics Blog does any coverage on this. They usually have a great take on these matters.
Like most things, TFA only looks at a part of the equation, and a few posters here have pointed out some of the different variables that show the problem with the media-bias argument, including:
- The volume of negative attacks by the republican camp upped the number of articles about Obama.
- The possibility of the arguably "most powerful man in the world" being a black man. That in itself is making history in the modern world.
- Whats more interesting news? A young, charismatic african-american or another old white guy?
- The length and ferocity of the Democratic primary alone skews the numbers in a huge way.
I'm only scratching the surface here - You could analyze this by any number of angles, and the truth is that these types of statistics are influenced by a huge number of factors where MANY and ALL of the factors result in the final the result.
Saying it's simply "media bias" is a really incomplete answer. It certainly is one of the factors, but far from being the only or predominant factor.
A Major problem the media (both traditional and alternative) is everyone is trying to distill very complex issues into very simple answers (or at worst, soundbites).
I was a serious photojournalist for 15 years,and watched the slow transition from what used to be a separation in News and Entertainment.
The Press used to (generally) be the watch-dog of culture and government. Now everything is "The Media" which values the dollars and ratings over all else, and the news is now a sub-set of the media.
That's not conspiracy BS, it's just the way of the world.
You can think of modern media as we used to compare internet users to AOL users.
-Internet Users knew that it was more difficult to use the net than AOL, but it resulted in a more satisfying experience with more individual control and personal security.
-AOL users just want it quick and easy, regardless of the loss of security or quality.
Media and news outlets now compete to give us their version of intellectual fast food; unfortunately far too many people take too much at face value, without any further thought or investigation.
Every media outlet and news organization have a bias (clearly some more than others); and depending which one you listen to, you are likely to be influenced by that bias, especially if it is a source you believe to be authoritative.
Sadly, we want it cheaper, faster, easier. And while this certainly appeals to the lazier aspects of everyone's nature, it comes at a great cost.
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
As the conservative commentator David Brooks has lamented, the Republican party has developed a strong anti-intellectual bias. Since reporting is a rather intellectual activity it's not surprising if this causes a media backlash.
He used the very hate mongering, vote buying crap the democrats have used for generations. He called anyone a racist that dared say a bad thing against him, lied about republicans saying he was a Muslim, even though they never mentioned it, lied to old folks and welfare people that the republicans were going to take away their benefits and they would be on the streets. He even had his own grandmother put down, because she wouldn't shut up about him not being born in the united states.
"After complaints of one-sided posting, slashdot checked their own articles and agreed. Linux was clearly favored, throughout it's years of use, in terms of more favorable articles, less criticism, better subject titles, and total disregard for problems such as lack of drivers." I can hear the mod flames already, but the analogy is just as faulty.
The reason why there was more news about the Obama camp then there was about McCain is simple; they were pretty much saying the same thing over and over. Also, if you delve a bit deeper into the numbers, some of the 'Obama' stories were actually defenses on McCain attacks.
God, McCain lost. Get over it. Use your energies rebuilding *your* party instead of trying to tear down the opposition. (That's what the Dems did after Kerry blew it...)
that the press has enough sense to favor a sane candidate with a sane VP choice, instead of a cranky, geriatric dude with batshit insane VP.
You're linking to posts on Slashdot that reference your own posts on Slashdot. And you want to talk about bias? Look up "echo chamber".
Yes, yes he did.
Yes and ... what the fuck are you talking about?
Pay attention. Pay close attention.
The media coverage is PART of the strategy.
Did you get that? About it being part of the strategy?
So the strategy cannot fail because the media chose not to participate the way YOU would LIKE them to.
The strategy failed because the strategy was FLAWED. The strategy had LARGER flaws and MORE of them than the opponents' strategy.
But, when Putin raises his head, and comes to U.S. airspace... Where do they go? It's Alaska! See? No worries!
That's like saying the media supports the "round earth" vs "flat earth" arguement. I am all for delivering *balanced* news but at some point you got to say "here you have the good guys and here's the idiots"...
So, I read the article. After June 4 (only comparisons after this date make sense because the dems. went on so long prior to their nomination) Obama got 42 more stories at the WP than McCain. So, based on their calculations, McCain got 3% less coverage than Obama. You know, some of that 3% could just represent more effort by the Obama camp to push their candidacy to the press. It isn't like the press has to go out and find all of its stories, some portion of stories are released by the campaigns to target specific press agencies. Obama did outspend McCain after all.
Neville Chamberlain, World War II.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
You want to talk about bias? How about they report how many stories were done about the Green, Independent or Libertarian candidates; or any of the other 33 viable political parties in this country?
No, the press is biased. Period. Where I see it is in their dumbing down of America to just a two party system (neither of which was popular until the 20th century.)
America is screwed until we as a people realize that there are many of ways of thinking and solutions don't just boil down to tax the rich or fear of war.
Politics is not just dems vs GOP, not just taxes vs military, not just abortion vs God. Politics is not a zero-sum game.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I run a business that has been profitable, and stand to see a tax increase in the next few years. I'm still excited about Obama, though, because I don't think a McCain administration would have been much of an economic steward in the next few years, particularly for the tech industry. I'd rather pay the taxes and keep my business running than go through another multi-year recession with no hand on the tiller.
But what I don't get is this part:
My SO is altering course from medical school to Physician's Assistant school just so she can get a regular salary and regular hours (even if it's under $100k) rather than establish a Byzantine bureaucracy in her own eventual practice to double- and triple-book patients just so she can run a profitable practice.
You've just described life under private insurance, which clearly sucks. I'm not proposing that Obama will necessarily make all of these problems go away, but I find it hard to criticize the guy for wanting to make things better.
My only personal experience with socialized medicine was in France when I got a nasty case of bronchitis. Rather than double- and triple- booking me, collecting co-pays, etc., the doctor took plenty of time. When he realized I wasn't a citizen (and thus had to actually compensate him) he laughed it off as a hassle and handed me the antibiotics from a sample case. I can't see this being worse than the utter disaster we have now...
The only thing more fun than setting up a winner is killing him with a thousand cuts. "Obama, promising change, hires from Clinton staff," "Nonpartisan politics not Rahm Emanuel's style," "Obama staff cautions, change will come slowly" ...
Sit back and watch!
Every media outlet is *extremely* biased against Bob Barr. He got virtually no coverage.
Is it because the media has an anti-libertarian bias? No, it's because that isn't who the public wants to hear about.
"Give the people what they want." I think the fact that Obama was the more popular candidate may have influenced the increase of media coverage about him, in the same way that media coverage influences opinions. It's a vicious cycle, and the end result is that once someone gets into the spotlight, he tends to stay there.
Celebrity gossip works the same way. Paris Hilton's exploits are only stories because the media follows her. News outlets are entertainment sources too, and they go where the gossip is. I don't see how any sense of responsibility to democracy fits into that mission, so there's no reason to expect "unbiased" coverage.
You don't see a lot of positive articles about serial killers either.
An article about the Keating 5 or erratic behavior or a poor choice of VP may make McCain look bad but it doesn't necessarily mean bias in the article.
which is what i do too
in which case, if the bias is natural, is there anything wrong with it? should anything really be done about it?
news reporting favors liberal thinking
everyone should get used to it. its natural and unavoidable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
..because the MSM (all sides of it) are convinced their viewers and listeners are idiots and morons, so they wouldn't have done anything described by the grandfather post, because that would have been entirely too subtle for them!
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
It's funny how there is a name out there for everyone who has an opposed view. Beyond trying to qualify my post by simple definition, try providing a point of clarification, or a counter argument. Even if you feel correct, your point doesn't provide substantial grounds to lead anywhere.
I admit my post doesn't well explain what I was trying to say. My point is better stated at the end of a thread above:
"...media bias doesn't only exist in what is reported, but also what isn't. Legal precedings, personal affiliations and more were never reported. I don't care so much that Obama had x more articles, or front page articles. If that's what people are relying on to get the 'fair' coverage they want, then the Country is already in a mess. What is more important is that the information is true, unbiased and without reporter opinion."
The information in my original post was only meant to support that argument. My apologies that the argument wasn't placed before the evidence. I can see how that would make me appear Trolling.
The bias exhibited by the main stream news media isn't primarily toward liberal, conservative, or any particular political party. It is a bias toward their corporate sponsors. How much news is reported by MSNBC, CBS, FOX, etc., on the damage done by their largest corporate sponsors? Walmart, GM, GE, McDonald's, etc. The bias is not seen as much in the slant of what is covered, but by what is not covered.
For instance, one of the problems with the UK press is that Murdoch's "News International" owns a big chunk of the media, and openly "sells" its audience to whichever politician has currently earned Murdoch's favour. By being able to promise to deliver a great big chunk of votes, M got to grease a number of business deals that shouldn't otherwise have gotten through. It's an open secret that Murdoch's papers will have an editorial opinion on any matter that relates to his business, that will sagely advise readers that the side of the argument that happens to make Murdoch the most money is the right one.
As part of Murdoch's strategy of being able to promise a "voter-block" to politicians, his "Sun" paper used to whip up virulently pro-nationalistic, anti-foreigner "hate" issues, as a way of encouraging the readership to be loyal to the paper and dismiss outside sources of information. He then used to openly claim that his papers could swing a national election one way or the other, depending on who he graced with his favours (hence the "Sun"'s headline after one election "It was the Sun what won it"). Ironically, Murdoch himself was an Australian.
So, Murdoch was exactly the sort of malicious foreign meddler that the people who wrote US law wanted to keep out. The free press was critically important to the functioning of US democracy, and you couldn't allow foreigners with lots of money to simply buy chunks of it and start telling Americans who they ought to vote for. That's why the US has laws saying that non-Americans aren't allowed to go around buying up control of US media outlets.
When Murdoch decided to extend further into the the US market, those laws stopped him, so he had to become a nationalised US citizen to bypass the safeguards.
Murdoch is the guy behind Fox News.
Eric Baird
Feeding a country to an offended party is not the same as apologizing to the offended party.
They may follow each other yet they are not the same.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Find an election where there was a recession/economic downturn and the ruling party remained in power. Find a time where the president has the lowest appoval rating ever and the ruling party remained in office. Find a time where less than 10% of the country feels as though it's on the right path.
Can't?
Ok blame MSM. Say everyone is a socialist dupe. Above all, refuse to take responsiblity for your own ideological failures.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with this concept.
This correlation can not only be thought of as "Obama recieved more press and wins election" but rather as "Obama, a favorite to win the election, recived more press". My belief is that if you look at the causation it has more to do with a grassroots political effort.
Contrast this with how things happen here in Canada where we've had candidates shown very poorly in the press yet they still get elected.
I'm quite taken aback over the last while in retrospect of the election along the lines of "Well he only won because of..." or "People weren't voting for him but against..." Just making excuses for why he won like somehow it is impossible or even inconcievable for him to have won. It's this disbelief in the result that really leads me to think that the racial issues in the US still have a long ways to sort out.
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Not every story has two sides.
None do. Unfortunately, our press and our political system have conditioned us into the "us vs them" mentality. So, Americans only think there are two sides. And, they vote accordingly.
I agree with Bill Maher. Not every story has two sides.
The story has more than two sides. Where were the third party candidates ever mentioned in media coverage?
would get as much positive press as a smooth campaign by two qualified candidates running on a platform of
The candidate you describe sounds like Bob Barr to me, and also like Ron Paul while he was still running, but where did the media coverage go for their side of the story? The American Presidential race has been and will continue to be a popularity tug-of-war between the lesser of two evils until the debate is actually opened up to more than two barely distinguishable viewpoints.
You know, it would also be a lot less "biased" to say that the 2003 Detroit Tigers or the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers were just as good as the other sports teams. Who cares about losing a record 118 games or getting outscored 412-125?
They played hard! It's the media's fault for their biased reporting! They shouldn't report scores, they should let _US_ decide who won those seasons!
Because we can't admit that someone who can't answer the question "What magazines do you read?" without claiming that it's "gotcha journalism" is not prepared to lead anything, right? Oh, but it was a verbal gaffe, right? A gaffe that spanned several minutes. And the answer "I don't read many magazines." was somehow rejected in favor of "All of them." which made the follow-up questions asking for an example difficult. And that kind of gaffe somehow spread over three different interviews, with her getting tripped up even on Fox News.
But what do I know? I've only been a Republican my whole life. That's not long enough. I _have_ to be secretly biased against them! Avoid the media and their liberally-biased "facts" or you could turn out like me! You might accidentally vote for a Radical Liberal Christo-Muslim Terrorist Baby-Eating Commie Pinko Socialist like Obama!
but for the most part, they all fall somewhere around the center and try to keep it there.
Not according to this UCLA prof's research.
The idea that NY Times LA Times NBC CBS ABC Wash Post NPR AP are in the American center is laughable.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
They even showed that at the polls and Obama won.
Quite obviously more popular candidate will have more press coverage.
It seemd if there was good news, it was Obama. Bad news? McCain.
Cause or effect? Hmmm...
Yes I'm being a little snarky but I think a lot of folks are "seeing" bias in places where there is none. I'm not saying there isn't any media bias (Fox "news" clearly has taken sides) but that media bias is an easy scapegoat for poor or unpopular policies. Just because others disagree with you and the media reports that they don't agree doesn't mean the media is automatically biased.
John McCain ran a poor campaign and there was a lot of bad news (stuff like wars and a shitty economy) that as a republican he wears some responsibility for. Not always fair but that's life as the candidate for the incumbent party. Unfortunately for McCain, he/his campaign chose to pander to the republican base instead of clearly distancing himself from a very unpopular president Bush and the result was an incoherent message. That was NOT the media's fault. McCain failed to communicated a clear or compelling message and the voters responded as one would expect. John Kerry failed the same test four years ago.
I firmly believe that journalism as we know it is dead.
Are you naive enough to believe the press is ever completely impartial or objective? Sometimes they make a good effort at it but anyone who thinks there was some golden age of the press is deluding themselves. They're no better or worse than they ever were.
WHen the media would prefer to dig in top Ms. Palin's kid's personal life than Obamas, what does that say?
It says you are a candidate for the second highest elected office in the land and your children are nearly adults themselves. Obama's kids did nothing newsworthy. I'm not so naive as to think that children of political figures are actually off limits despite the press claiming that they are. I remember during the 1992 campaign members of the press commenting on what an ugly child Chelsea Clinton was. Mean, unfair and wrong but that's politics. When you run for high office you accept that EVERY little detail of your life will be scrutinized in minute detail. This include children, parents, family, close associates and people they barely know. Whether the politician has any control over the other persons actions is irrelevant and perception is more important than fact most of the time.
you want to tell me something like methamphetamine should be freely available to people?
see, the concept of freedom of choice is that it is a valid concept as long as people are... drum roll please... freely choosing. when they under duress, they are not making a free choice. one such form of duress is biological addiction. and some substances, like methamphetamine, represent an extremely easy biochemical pathway for addiction, for everyone, as long as your brain chemistry is that of homo sapiens. if you give someone a meth hit week after week for a few weeks, regardless of what they think of that hit (tied down forced versus happily engaged in) after a few weeks their body will actively crave it, altering their mental processes to engage in drug seeking behavior rather than a job, a relationship
in any way, do ou dispute that extremely straightforward obvious depiction? then you're deluded beyond belief. these are statements of simple pharamcological truth
therefore, in the name of increasing freedom, you reduce the availability of substances which are extremely inebriating+extremely addicting to people. because, while the first hit might be freely chosen, every hit after that is less and less of a freely chosen preoccupation
meanwhile, you seriously worry me
"many people who try or end up using these 'highly addictive, highly inebriating' substances you refer to have no problem holding a job, relationship, or anything else"
as a former aids counselor in lower east side manhattan in the early 1990s, i know very clearly what highly addictive+highly inbrieating drugs do to people. i've seen it lead to death a number of times
you, on the other hand, sound exactly like a junkie in denial
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This goes along with Tom Brokaw's recent conversation where he admitted that he really doesn't know what Obama stands for!
They went with young and exciting, and just like Carter exciting will fail to deliver, and all the Obama cultists will be FURIOUS with the papers and news for "deceiving" them. So now what they're doing is saying, "Hey, it's not us, Obama deceived us too!"
For a typical reaction, check out the end of the most recent South Park, where Randy finds out change has failed to materialize.
OR did it practice ALL these things since its creation AND long after ww2 ended?
Translate "Lebensraum" and finding it in the east and the way america was founded by claiming land westwards belonging to the natives.
Sorry, the US was NEVER idiologically opposed to the nazi's. It was more a case of two big nasty dogs not wanting to share the same world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps Obama resonated with Americans because the media portrayed him so positively? The fact that you don't see a problem is exactly the problem. Liberals look at CNN ABC CBS NBC NPR Wash Post NY Times LA Times and don't see anything wrong because those outlets reflect their worldview. Conservatives get exasperated because the other side is not presented. Moderates don't notice the difference because they aren't really political people.
And in a country that even in this down year for Republicans identifies itself as 22 percent liberal, 34 percent conservative, and 44 percent moderate, when 85% of the "journalists" voted for Obama (a fair estimate, since those numbers voted for Gore in 2000), there is a problem. Liberal reporters see a liberal worldview, and don't see anything wrong. Conservatives see bias.
For the record, for a guy like Obama with a short resume with no real accomplishments running for leader of the free world, his associations are relevant, especially when said candidate tries to constantly associate McCain with Bush.
And McCain was proposing a tax credit for healthcare for the vast majority of Americans, something I have been wanting for years and Democrats have fought (because they think it should be a government-run entitlement). Only small amount of people would see their benefits get a net tax. I guess your fair media didn't mention that.
And for you Euros out there dying to tell we Americans that US liberals aren't really left, that is irrelevant. We are talking American politics here, where the center is obviously to the right of Europe.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
"Not my president", "end of an error", that's what you're all worked up about? I'm sorry, how could that sentiment be expressed in a less civil way? I sure know I couldn't be that nice when talking about Sarkozy -- can't help but make it rhyme Kaposi.
I'm really scratching my head on this one. Are you aware of the kind of bile that is spewed by Bill 'Fallafel' O'Riley or Rush Limbaugh?
Or are you brain-damaged just like most right wing authoritarians and just aren't aware of it?
You know, they had video recording devices back in 2004.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The single most slient point made in the story is that the Post admitted that the coverage was too hevily biased to the horse race instead of the issues and that this was not going to change. Niether cndidate had a single policy based in reality and the news organizations refused to point this out.
Despite the article count, I believe most people who didn't vote for Obama still feel we don't know enough about him. Mainstream media coverage isn't sufficient information to choose a candidate, only necessary information to make us fall in love long enough to vote.
Why are we grouped into Obama or McCain? I didn't vote because, well first my vote doesn't really matter.
Also because I think none of the candidates had my best interests in mind. With all the technology that is out now, why don't we elect our president by popular vote? We now have the precision and speed able to do so. Shouldn't that be a topic for debate over the next four years?
If you can't name any of the positive solutions McCain proposed
I can name solutions that McCain proposed, but I wouldn't consider them positive from my point of view
None of those would I consier positive.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Why should McCain and Obama get equal treatment? What about all the minor-party candidates who got nearly no coverage by the press?
> Funny, I was about to respond to the parent by saying that some people mistakenly think Godwin's law is an actual law.
Maybe not, but if your only argument is "he's like the Nazis!" you probably don't have much in the way of actual argument.
Unless, perhaps, you're talking about someone who used the panic following disasters to grant himself near-absolute power. But, hopefully, even that comparison will be proven invalid this January.
That's no "character smear", it goes straight to the heart of the kind of person he is.
Dog is my co-pilot.
After a plane crash landed in Iowa a few years ago, one airline representative accused the media of running very unfavorable news items about the crash and that news media are required to be balanced in their coverage. To which, an LA Times reporter asked if showing one plane landing safely for every plane crashed would make it balanced? That is, as soon as a plane has crashed, what should the media do: show as many accounts of safe landings before or after showing the crash? Does it not make sense for the media to just report all disasters?
McCain's campaign was, in short, one disaster after another. Each disaster had its own life cycle that got amplified by McCain Campaign. Contrast this with Obama's campaign, which had no comparable disasters, except for the Wright affair. And even that the campaign used it to make an excellent educational piece about race relations. The speech was marked as one of the high-points of political discourse in the country's history. Even revival of the issue did nothing but bring back the great race speech into focus.
In short, there weren't that many Obama disasters to show for each McCain fumble. Whenever there was one, Obama campaign used it to advance the discourse instead of playing to worst fears or smears against the opponent.
Contrast that with McCain's campaign, who not only had many more disasters, but fumbled badly on each one, which kept the story alive, raise doubts about the candidate, and chip his credentials. Even when the issue was about his VP pick, the ultimate fault was lain on McCain's shoulders.
Blaming the media of bias is like asking the media to cover more safe landings of planes before they cover crash landings.
...just by who they show and who they don't.
Early in Ron Paul's campaign, the participant activity was very large, yet he often got simply left out of mainstream media reporting. He was constantly described to have "a large internet following, but,,,,". It was a sudden strike of the obvious, where lots of ordinary people suddenly stopped swallowing the approved drivel that was being fed to them by the mainstream media--and this most likely HORRIFIED the media. It was a testament to their irrelevance, because the internet was a venue they had no control over.
He rallied far more people (and money) than all of the other third party candidates did, and more than some other candidates did early on. How popular could he have been with the media coverage that the "chosen" party candidates received?
Go to
http://www.ronpaultimeline.com/
and click on "blackout" to see the list.
Many times Ron Paul got left out of news reports, even when other candidates who had already officially dropped out were still included.
This time around at least, "the power of the internet" was no match for the "ministry of truth".
Also We Note: Ron Paul was commonly called a "kook" by news media--he was the ONLY candidate who had a derogatory name attached to him.
What were the other candidates' nicknames then?....
I didn't vote this time around, and this is the reason why--the one candidate who advocated doing things most productive to the US got shut out early on, and most voters never even noticed.
~
You Republicans really never learn anything. You're demented.
I'm not a Republican. Nice try though. If you read I called them socialists too. AND they are.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Posts like this make me realize how ignorant/blissful/uninformed my fellow Americans really are. Obama and our current vice president are blood cousins. Cheney was the head of the CFR (council of foreign relations) before he was put in office. Why would he official deny this position until after getting the seat as vice president? Do you know who else is in the CFR? Obama's wife! The CFR mandate the mainstream news that AP and Reuters use, which are in turn the two main sources for all the major American news outlets (all owned by 6 corporations). When you connect the dots, it's not hard to see why the press loves Obama. The last few presidential elections had way more coverage on both candidates. By the way, many people believe the CFR is to blame for the first depression and causing a run on the banks by telling the news outlets to run stories on how banks really work. Now they're just telling us how the stock market and loans work and here's another depression coming. WWIII is now around the corner and I have to worry about getting drafted. Illuminati 500 bloodlines anyone? :)
I don't see any articles about how the press was unfair to Nader!! .. or Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney
And this means... what? Turnout is okay as long as it's the people that support your guy?
I'm 22, and have the right to vote and I chose to exercise that right. In fact, don't argue it was only young voters. According to the CNN exit polls, Obama won all age groups 18-64.
Media is held by publicly owned companies that participate in the market. As far as I'm concerned any party that purports that the free market and deregulation are the solution to all our economic woes, shouldn't cry foul when the market doesn't work in their favor.
Obama was just flat out a better story, and the better story sells. Suck it up republicans, and figure out how to make your story better in 4 years.
Seriously. Claiming media bias is just a lame excuse for having done a piss poor job running a campaign.
the complementary choice to "overreact" is not "cower and apologize."
i'm sure your man would have had a different solution: stamp his feet and cry like a bitch while putin stomps all over a bunch of turnip farmers in georgia. in the current downturn, we'll see russia turn into a shriveled up wretch like its been the last 20 years. no petrodollars=shit economy. just like his neighbor, sarah palin.
Here is what a long time experienced ABC journalist said about the media bias on Oct. 24:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=6099188&page=1
(hint from the middle of the article: "But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.").
The journalist is Michael Malone, who has done a variety of different types of reporting for more than 30 years. He explains why the media messed up, and it is a bit deeper than the superfical stuff some people are throwing around.
Nobody accused Obama of "being a terrorist." Palin criticized his association with William Ayers, one of many eye-opening assocations Obama had that the press gave him a pass on. Obama did things like run a commercial mocking McCain for not using a computer, which was actually due to his war injuries that make it painful to type. Yet, these negative ads were glossed over by the press--only McCain got criticized for going negative with his campaigning. You'd think that Obama had never said anything bad about McCain or ran a negative ad. I even saw one claiming McCain was going to ban abortion.
Frankly, McCain was going negative because his campaign was desperately trying to get any kind of news attention. Obama dominated coverage all year long. I remember in the summer when Drudge Report breathlessly reported each leg of Obama's trip through Europe like he was already president. It was as though McCain didn't even exist. The Associated Press even ran articles defending Obama from McCain's attacks, and one of them cited a liberal thinktank group that praised Obama's tax plan (without mentioning the group's political affiliation, of course). The same author of that piece went onto write an op-ed claiming that bringing up Obama's affiliations, like Ayers, was an attempt to portray him as un-American, which was vaguely "racist" (huh?).
Basically, when McCain stayed positive, he was ignored by the press. When he went negative, he was bashed by the press. Couple that with media studies showing an emergent slant in journalist political beliefs, you can't help wonder just how many percentage points the press actually cost McCain. You might even be a Democrat and be glad that Obama won--but it's still something you should wonder about.
The most glaring example would be the mortgage crisis--Obama shot up in the polls, and McCain's campaign never recovered. However, if you go back through history, you actually find that many Democrat social programs (like the Community Reinvestment Act) pushed banks into making high-risk loans to poor people who couldn't pay them back, all in the name of "social justice." Several Democrats served at Fannie Mae, and the biggest recipient of donations from Fannie Mae was...Barack Obama. You even find out that both Bush and McCain warned about the coming crisis in 2003, but they were blocked and criticized by Democrat Barney Frank.
None of that was reported to any reasonable degree by the press. Republicans were blamed for something that Democrats were equally responsible for, if not moreso. I think this is the most frustrating aspect of the 2008 election--that the party which was mostly responsible for the economic crisis was rewarded for it with the presidency and a bigger majority in Congress. Now we have a one-party supermajority of people who voted for the government bailout when the public didn't want it.
Governments work best when they do little. Clinton and the GOP Congress kept each other busy through bickering, and that made them leave us alone. I wanted McCain because I didn't want another one-party government like we had under Bush. McCain also has a history of bipartisan legislation and working with Democrats. Obama has no such history, and he's already appointing people who are aggressively partisan. The Democrats are kicking out anyone who doesn't think like they do--Lieberman's committee position is under threat. I don't think it's going to be a very good presidency when the hype dies down and Obama has to actually do stuff.
A nationwide poll, taken on November 4th 2008, showed that America is unfairly biased in favor Obama.
For the millions and millions of Americans that watch Fox News, Obama was portrayed on a very biased basis. I watched Fox News *once* throughout the entire campaign and it was a disgrace.
A huge cable news channel that was trying desperately to show how it was bad to vote for Obama, by either trying to make jokes about his policies or trying to cast him as a terrorist.
Maybe, maybe, some sections of the "press" or news media did favour Obama by publishing more stories about him, but that's really only the beginning of the story (sic.) You need to look at what those stories were about, what bias there was in each media organisation, etc, to understand what the numbers mean.
Reporters, journalist, etc. are self-selecting. They're people who chose to go into the field of journalism. Is it any surprise that people with similar interests and similar education would come out with similar ideas and beliefs? Research has shown time and again that journalists overwhelmingly vote for democrats. Human nature being what it is, we shouldn't find it surprising that journalists under deadline pressures don't always have time to go back and carefully remove any of their own biases, or that they may not even recognize their own bias, particularly when their peers have the same biases.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I am somewhere right in the middle, and while I'm not upset that Obama won, I did not vote for him. I would like to know this...
Those who voted for Obama... does it not bother you that he went to a church for TWENTY years where the minister spewed white-hating, America-hating, garbage?
I mean, I know most rumors about Obama (ie: muslim, terrorist ties, etc) are complete bunk, but that Jeremiah Right fellow is very real. Given, I know that just because you attend a church that does not mean you agree with everything said. However, the moment some guy in the pulpit starts saying that kind of crap, I'd be out. I wouldn't hang around for twenty more years.
I never said "never disrespect by booing", you moron.
And saying that Bush is "not my president" is not disrespectful; it's stating one's disapproval. Considering that Bush is a war criminal, that's a pretty tame way of putting it.
You think you're not a right wing authoritarian, but you probably believe you're not entirely devoid of wit, yet it appears that there are some clues otherwise.
BTW, calling the Democratic party "far left" is hilarious. They're center right by European standards. Get a brain, moran!
I'm also aware of the horrible things that a few in the liberal media have said.
1. Cite? And no, "I don't like Bush" or "not in my name" is not "horrible."
2. What is your definition of liberal media? CNN? MSNBC? I'm litterally rolling on the floor laughing, and beating the ground so hard the neihgbours knocked on the door to complain.
The media is not supposed to be biased. There is this thing called journalistic ethics that says you must be a neutral party when reporting the news. There are things like opinion pages and editorials that are allowed to be biased and I think people mix this up with actual news. Actual news stories are absolutely not supposed to be biased, the problem is they are, and the WP has admitted to it as has ABC. Just about every other major news organization was in the corner for Obama and just doesn't have the balls to fess up.
There is a difference between a political pundit like Shawn Hannity and a reporter like Anderson Cooper. Hannity is allowed to state his opinion because he does so with the pundit hat on, Cooper on the other hand is not allowed to state his opinion because he is a reporter. This is journalism 101 and everyone here seems to think it's ok to ignore ethics so long as everyone else is doing it. This is the year that journalism died. And anyone who think's Fox news is in the tank for McCain obviously didn't watch a lick of Fox news. And even if you do believe that, it's undeniable that almost every single other print and TV media outlet was in Obama's corner. When You can't trust the press to give you honest news reports, where do you turn?
Obama won, and McCain lost, but the real looser is the press, they cannot be trusted to report the news without adding their own slant. And they provide this slant in the name of goodness and justice and to better mankind. Problem is I don't agree with their brand of politics. There is never any solution in government, government is the problem, and you succeed, not because of government, but in spite of government.
The greatest trick of the left is to redefine the language. The leftist would have you believe that the political spectrum on the far right is facisim. This is demonstratably false. The only facist governments in my memory have been leftist socialist governments, for example Germany's Hitler was a socialist, Italy's Mussolini was a socialist. The reason it has been redefined by the left is to scare people into thinking that if they are too rightest they will end up killing all the Jews or some such nonsense. In reality moving to the right produces nothing but less and less government.
Think of the political spectrum not as right and left but as MIN and MAX like a volume knob. Think of right as MIN government, and think of left as MAX government. When this country started we started at MIN government, and every year since then the government itself has lobbied for more and more government. Government, in this country and others, is self perpetuating, like a cancer that will continue to draw more and more blood from the healthy tissue to support the massive, and quite useless, tumor, so too will government continue to draw the blood of its people until they are left with nothing.
Government is not the solution to any problem. There will never be anyone who cares about your life and the problems of your family except you. You cannot force free people to give a damn about you. You cannot force free people to pay for other less fortunate people. You cannot force a free people to subsidize with their taxes ideas they disagree with.
We, the free people of this country, will eventual shed the tyrannical yoke of government again when the burden becomes too much. Hopefully we do this by voting to the right and make this government less and less until it stops the income tax! Stops the sales tax! Stops the property tax! For the first 150 years of this country these taxes did not exist and only with a massive shift to the left were these taxes even possible. Vote right and stop the spread of socialism and communism!
Freedom is not free and you can't just get it back once you have given it up!
So Kennedy should have denied everything and looked like a huge ass to the international community when the CIA was caught with its pants down after Bay of Pigs? Sounds like a plan!
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Your signature had its intended effect of wasting my time!
What about the possibility that there were more positive articles about Obama because he was the better candidate, more interesting, and just generally led reporters to be more positive? Maybe instead of "bias" that's just "truth". McCain was boring and unpleasant.
After reading this post from 538 it occurred to me: reporters are actually putting a lot of effort into supporting the facade that the McCain campaign isn't depressing and lifeless. If they let through the truth of it sometimes, that's not bias, that's just doing some decent reporting from time to time.
I never said anything infringing upon your rights.
I was more inferring that the people voting for Obama mostly where youngsters. It's a simple fact, my friend, Obama got more young people out to vote than anyone before him.
That DOESN'T mean that said people getting out to vote are actually informed of what is going on. It only means they have little to go upon because of a lack of experience in, well, LIFE.
It's kind of hard to have people talk about what life was like in, say, Carter's reign over the US, but then again, the same age group that pretty much delivered the Obama vote delivered Carter, as well.
And the similiarities are erie. VERY erie.
--Toll_Free
I hear also that during the ENTIRE campaign, Obama had a clear liberal bias!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l46t_nrySg4
The friking media runs this country. Be it influencing Votes on such wonderful things like DMCA to deciding who will be the most "Media Friendly" candidate...I..E... has the same shit polished views as those in media power. They then latch on to them and ...whamo! a new president is elected. Gawd this was sooo obvious to everyone I know. Obama OR Mccain supporters.
> Lets assume for a minute that that's true. For the sake of argument, complete this sentence: "If the media was doing its job, it would have focused more on _______". Provide specific examples.
That's gotcha journalism! That's how they got Tucker Bounds on CNN, just because he didn't know any specific decisions Palin had made and they wouldn't take "all of them" but insisted on an example! And how they got Palin, when she was asked what newspapers or magazines she read, said "all of them" and couldn't give an example.
Questions asking for proof are biased and un-Republican! Stop the biased reporting, it's unfair!!!
With GW not around to kick reporters are going to have to start doing research instead of getting on the GW/Republican bash bandwagon.
I don't know, the Republicans seem to blame everything on Clinton and his blowjob even today. So I guess we Dems get at least eight years of bitching about Bush and the war in Iraq.
That is all.
The media [Hollywood, Television, All news but Fox] are all Liberal outlets. Once upon a time they pretended they didn't care; they don't do that anymore.
The rest of the USA [Colleges, Unions, Science] are all mind-frelled into thinking that by raising taxes, fairness happens. It doesn't.
So that leaves you as the one american with his head screwed on correctly?
And they think they're all so 'open minded' while throwing Oreo cookies at State Representative Steele (a negro) because he's Conservative, not because he's black. At least they're not burning books yet. Merely hiding them in every bookstore you go to.
I didn't throw cookies at anyone. Is it suddenly okay to accuse a whole half of the political spectrum for crimes a few individuals committed? Because if so I'd like to point out that you have these neandertals on your side
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_5399.shtml
and total disregard for problems such as his drug use
fucking puritans. I wish all the boats had sunk on the way over from england so the world would be rid of you morons
That's what the wingnuts are really complaining about: that the media didn't put out enough negative stories about Obama to their liking, or failing that, just make shit up like they did to Gore in 2000. You can prove this yourself in about two seconds:
Just ask them how much they complained about how the press didn't vet Bush back in 2000. Or if they voted for Gore because Bush was woefully inexperienced. Situational ethics personified.
Clearly a mouthpiece of the American elite. Just one example.
Your comment is, I think, mostly a reflection of your lack of exposure to world media, which is unsurprising, since it's hard to get at here, apart from the BBC.
I recall a comment from the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein himself would watch updates from CNN. Give the people of the world besides yourself some credit for intelligence - it's possible to form your own opinions on a broadcast regardless of its "spin".
But thanks for your "vote" for totalitarianism! Stalin would definitely have agreed with your thesis, that the people are cattle that need to be ruled with an iron fist!
The press portrayed him as a savior and McCain/Palin as evil morons. I'm not saying it's not true, just how it was spun by the press.
It's over, let's embrace it, congrats to Obama.
He's not perfect by any means, but he sucked less than the other choice.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
Are people actually forgetting the fact that Obama is an incredible orator? And that he has incredible charisma? Someone who can speak as well Obama is certainly going to get more positive press; He engages way more people.
Did you know that his entire time in office he pass only TWO bills. What were they you might ask, one was relief aid for Kenya. The other? He named a post office. Yes people, this is who you elected.
What's the point of writing all the time about the journalistic equivalent to canned SPAM when you can have filet mignon?
There seems to be some odd theory of media neutrality that says there should be no indications that the person running the better campaign is in fact running the better campaign.
Of course Obama got better coverage. While McCain was talking about professors that did violent acts in the sixties (And BTW - notice how all the people that claim the second amendment is about resisting the government when it abuses it's power happily jumped on a bandwagon to vilify someone, y'know, resisting the government, when it abused it's power. I guess it's patriotism when conservatives shoot, terrorism when liberals shoot back - {G}.)
Was John McCain supposed to get front page coverage *every* time he brought up the fact he was a pow? If that was the definition of 'fair' we're looking for just say so.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Press? What's "Press"? Is there a website?
As reported in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (Vol CXX, Nov 2005, Issue #4; A MEASURE OF MEDIA BIAS by TIM GROSECLOSE AND JEFFREY MILYO), CBS' news coverage is further left than the DNC and just right of Senator Kennedy. NBC and ABC are just right of the DNC, but still far left. MSNBC is just left of center, while Fox is just right of center. The Wall Street Journal Op Ed is conservative, while their reporting is liberal (still trying to figure that one out). The NYT is just plain in the pocket of the DNC, much as Saturday Night LIve (see Chevy Chase's remarks on his portrayal of President Ford), and Gary Trudeau (Doonesbury).
Impetuous! Homeric!
Personally, if the press actually went "deeper" into Bill Ayers, etc., my opinion of them would be even lower than it is now, given how insubstantial many of the allegations were. And if they went "deep" into the tenuous connections between Obama and Ayers or Khalidi without going "deep" into their tenuous connections with McCain, that would be blatant bias ...
I'm not sure if I'm real.
I thought just watching Fox News would be proof enough ...
I'm not sure if I'm real.
I can't for the life of me believe that more money in campaign ads makes all the difference in the world...
I vote for Senator McCain because of his military service record(who was the last president to serve in the military?)
Governor Palin would have meant "a woman in a high government position." I don't believe she would have set well with "politics as usual."
I immediatly agreed to support Pres-elect Obama however, because I hope that He can help heal the 180 years of stupid racial hatred we whiteys have so suffered on others simply because "they don't look like us."
But to tell me that money did this so berates the aesthetic values I cannot escape from!
I am resolve that I don't care what happens therefore, all I care about is that the United States of America must support Israel...won't that be interesting?
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
No, it's the private insurers that all have different forms, run up administrative costs which typically account for more than half of the bill, and then refuse to actually pay when it matters.
All the doctors I know, including those in my immediate family, are absolutely horrified at how difficult it is for them to actually treat their patients properly. The most serious impediment is the current state of private insurance. Our "socialized" government programs don't cover the full costs of many common procedures these days, but at least the overhead is low - and since the docs would rather provide the care, a little loss for these needy patients is just that... a little (and predictable) loss. For a private insurance patient, it can be massive.
I agree that the system is almost completely broken. But it's not broken in quite the way you (and your SO) seem to think it is. I'm not convinced by Obama's vague plans yet, but they're better than McCain's. By a long shot. Any plan that results in significant paperwork reduction is a big deal. Any plan that results in an increase is a big problem. When a one-doctor practice with EMR up and running *needs* three administrative people, not counting the actual accounting firm, that's a problem.
The first 5 posts I read ranged from "This is why we can't have free speech" to "Of course they were in the tank for him"
What the hell is wrong with you people?
Restrict the media? You've sure as hell gotten used to handing over your rights at the first sign of a problem. Good job America, land of the terrified and overreacting. What happened to the America of "I don't agree with what you're saying, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it"
From TFSummery:
A difference of 42 storys. The damn sky is falling. What, a 6% difference? Obama won by a margin of 364 to 174. The damn thing is over and with good reason. People are sick of this very stupidity we're seeing here. The petty need to divide it up into camps. The unending assumption that everyone in the damn country is out to steal your money and bomb your home.
/. is a decent place, but shit like this makes me wonder why I bother anymore. Most of you are reasonably intelligent people, you fucking know better then this. Grow up.
Can't we fix the god damn country now, and go back to being petty backstabing sons-a-bitches later?
There are times
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
"Say what you want about rich people, but the one's I know are much less obsessed with money than most of the poor people I know."
When you're thirsty, how 'obsessed' are you with getting something to drink?
So Obama made more news. So what? So his ancient history wasn't smeared.....so what? That's not "bias". Fox News is bias....and they weren't cheering for Obama.
Only boring people are ever bored.
The youth vote was, according to the exit poll, 18% of the electorate. To say "most" of Obama's supporters were 18-30 just doesn't make sense mathematically.
I find it insulting that you question the ability for us under 30 to responsibly vote, that we must be naive because we chose the other guy. What happens in Washington doesn't just affect the people that were able to vote for Carter (or Ford).
The other big story was how John Kerry only threw his ribbons, not his medals, over the White House fence. Forget about the fact the he had medals to throw in the fist place, owing to his honorable service, when Bush had only his shirking of his Guard duty to tout. Not too mention the fact that he was pushed to the head of the line ahead of more qualified pilots to get there, and miss out on the war that Kerry went to fight. Somehow though, the liberal media once again missed this chance to make Kerry look favorable and chose to concentrate on the negative.
Cut to 2008, where the republican candidate has changed his view and vote on every issue he ever said he believed in. Do we hear a "flip-flopper" anywhere in the press? After crucifying Kerry for holding on to his medals and not getting "wounded enough" to have received them in the first place, we don't hear anything about graduating 894 out of 899 from his military school, or crashing two planes. Just that he shot two down. We don't hear about how McCain got his wings back even though he could no longer fly.
Somehow the kid from Chicago who grew up helping the less fortunate became the elite, and the poor student, poor pilot, entitled, son of two admirals, who married an heiress, became the hero of the working class. Darn those liberal media elite! They missed another chance to help our guy and instead championed the other guys candidate. They must have missed the meetings where we didn't want them to do that.
As with most stories of this kind, it is skewed. Obama got more raw favorable news coverage, but take a look at WHAT was covered, and more importantly, what was not. A lot of stories were covered because the McCain campaign brought them up. A lot of things that that campaign said needed covering, and fact checking. They said a LOT of negative things that failed the truth check, and the news spent time straightening out the stories. The fact is, the McCain campaign focused most of its effort on Obama, not on themselves, and the Obama campaign did the opposite. The end result is that there is more coverage of Obama. Now look at what wasn't covered. Many of McCain's skeletons remained in the closet. Very little coverage of his role in the Keating 5. Very little coverage of his memberships in groups related to the Iran-Contra affair. Yet they DID cover every attempt to slime Obama from the McCain camp. The press, by and large, did attempt to cover the McCain campaign, and for quite a while did the campaigns bidding (until the campaign lashed out at the press). Unfortunately the McCain campaign tried to make this election about Obama, and did it badly, giving Obama a lot more press. That is McCain's fault, not the press. Besides, what do you expect when you attack the press? You expect them to get all warm and fuzzy over you?
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
The results of an American election may have massive ramifications on the rest of the world, but fortunately, as a non-citizen you still can't vote in our elections, your opinion has no value, carries no weight and should rightly be disregarded when American citizens enter a polling booth.
Assuming you're European, you had your shot at messing up the world. Step back, it's our turn now.
If we're really going to bitch about about Obama getting more press than McCain, why aren't we also bitching about third party candidates not getting any media coverage at all?
It's turtles all the way down!
Uhm, no...you seem to be missing the forest for all these trees.
No, I understood it just fine. Disagreed with all of it, but thought two parts were far enough out there to bother pointing out. The first again was that you seem to think you're the only one doing his job right. The second was that you can't say liberals are all hypocrites, just as I can't say all conservatives are skinheads. Instead of addressing that, you posted more unrelated right-wing propaganda.
Yeah, I listened to the actual question. But I can name at least a dozen news outlets that I read on a somewhat regular basis via Google News. She should be able to give an example. Period. If she can't, I have to believe she's hiding something. And whatever she's hiding can't be good, period. That same secrecy only lends credence to the claims made in the Wasillia email. She's also managed to unintentionally confirm several other bits of the other scandals via non-denial denials.
And we have a right to know how well-informed she is or isn't. We _should_ reject uninformed candidates. So like you said, she's trying (poorly) to hide the fact that she's not well-informed. Because anyone who is well-informed could rattle off a list with no problem. I mean, I personally have been reading the Anchorage Daily News (especially the good info on Sarah Palin from _before_ her VP days), the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, Wired, Ars Technica, 538, Newsweek, SF Chronicle, and probably dozens of others that I don't see often enough to remember off the top of my head (I know some are websites, but that's because I get most of my news online). If you can't give a list like that, you're NOT well-informed. Period.
Frankly, I feel like she's the female version of Bush, in terms of policy, charisma and IQ. She is fairly likable, but I'm not voting for another Bush-like person and I don't care how big the R next to her name is.
Oh, and the "57" states thing? He meant to correct himself to say 47, but left out the forty. Listen to it and there's a pause there. He's not trying to hide who he is. Hell, he has an entire book about himself (which discusses the drug use mentioned in the summary) and a website filled with stuff people don't read (maybe they don't like the PDFs?). I bet he could list 20 news sources easily. Ask him sometime. And feel free to make it as big of a trap as you want.
Obama can take the heat. Palin can't.
The implicit presumption in the Washington Post's analysis of it's own reporting is that both candidates deserved equal press. If Hitler were running against Ghandi, it might be "balanced" to make sure you say an equal number of nice things about both of them, but it wouldn't be sane.
Myself, I would argue that if the press actually had a commitment to truth, they would have to use words like "lied" a lot more when talking about politicians -- this particular season, the Republicans were running a negative smear campaign founded on deceptions. It must take a fair amount of restraint to report in a neutral tone when one side is spewing bullshit that you know they know is bullshit.
Wow, you managed to compare running for the President of the United States to mudering people with an axe. I congratulate you sir (or madam) for your clearly "unbiased" view on govenment. Lets go over an example: Obama wants to create more govenment programs (positive). Obama wants the government to be more restrictive (negitive). Seriously, if you have near 50% split of people who believe in one way and an other who believe the opposite, there is always going to be a positive other side.
I think we can all agree that the number of axe murders is nowhere near 50%.
> Speaking of Obama, did he ever respond to that lawsuit about his birthplace? And no, a carefully-guarded fake-looking birth certificate doesn't count unless it's brought to court as evidence.
The lawsuit went nowhere, SFAIK, because it was meritless and frivolous. There's a nice image of it on Obama's website. The State of Hawaii doesn't go around showing everybody's birth certificate to everyone else, so it's no more "secret" than anyone else's. Obama showed it directly to the Associated Press, who confirmed its authenticity. And McCain & Obama both got together to sponsor a bill saying the whole issue was nonsense for both of them. McCain, as you may remember, was born on a US Army base in Panama and the law was corrected retroactively to make it clear that he should be counted as a citizen. Most of these "issues" have been raised by people who make up crap about people every single election (the people who did the "swift boating" of John Kerry were behind many of them). It's election year politics. People come up with all kinds of nonsense and it fades after the election. You know, like that lady who claimed to have a "B" cut into her face. Until the police saw that she was obviously lying and got her to confess to a hoax (which she then blamed the media for; mind you, the story was broken by Fox News and the Drudge Report...).
In short, the whole issue was utter nonsense that too many people wasted time on. Frankly, they're both Americans and I don't really give a damn about the ridiculous technicalities people claim bar them, except that if someone claims they're exclusive to one candidate, I will point out the controversy with respect to the other candidate. I consider the entire issue to be absurd.
But I'm surprised that you didn't know that Obama had addressed this. I mean, they started that "Fight the Smears" website just for that. You would have to live under a rock (or watch Fox News exclusively) not to know the whole story if you paid any attention to the information online.
I understand it as "baiting with red", like a torero waving a red drape in front of a raging bull.
> AFAIK, showing a fake birth certificate to a biased press source doesn't verify its authenticity in court.
"Biased"? "Fake"? On what evidence are you basing this? Some random guy's blog post? The same random guy who makes up crap about politicians every single year? I'm not buying it.
> Their response to the lawsuit was entirely inappropriate.
If it really was inappropriate, the Court would sanction them. Because it hasn't, I have to conclude the opposite: that the case was, in fact, frivolous and meritless.
Frankly, even if it were true that Obama were born elsewhere, I wouldn't care. I mean, I care plenty about the Bill of Rights, but that part just isn't important any more.
...it was Bush who got all the favorable publicity. Follow the money: the media does. They look to see who is getting the big money and then they jump on the bandwagon. When you are a lapdog, it pays to know which pockets have the food.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
It's an opinion, and one that would require a formal and in-depth study to back up.
I think we both agree this isn't the place for that.
However, those who want to attack it, like yourself, can offer contrary evidence as you'd like.
Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the Stateâ"and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.
Yes; the saying is in everybodyâ(TM)s mouth.
I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduce the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.
{ snip }
And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length, as you know, they cease to care
even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.
Yes, he said, I know it too well.
Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny.
Glorious indeed, he said. But what is the next step?
The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracyâ"the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and
this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.
{ snip }
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.
Yes, that is their way. This, and no other, is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.
{ snip }
And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen; by the favorite method of false accusation he brings them into court and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow-citizens; some he kills and others he banishes, at the same
time hinting at the abolition of debts and partition of lands: and after this, what will be his destiny? Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a man become a wolfâ"that is, a tyrant?
The Republic, Plato
Futurist Traditionalism