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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.'"
The media (with the exception of Fox News) has always had a pretty large liberal bias.
Really? To the rest of the world (or at least western Europe), even 'left wing' American newspapers appear hilariously conservative.
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
Why was this marked Troll? I find it a very valid statement.
Because it was loaded down with hyperbole and violated Godwin's law?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Of course you mean candidate, Unlike Obama, McCain kept his promise to stay within the public finance system which was a lot lower then Obama's fund raising.
Yes, funny how the bipartisan investigation found her guilty, then suddenly before the election a hand picked partisan panel cleared her of all charges. Gee, I wonder why nobody took that seriously.
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news.
Satellite makes it easier, but it's been a basically like this for way longer than that, and teh reasons run much deeper:
The point is that as the only superpower (or until recently one of two and everyone's ally unless you were already run by the soviets), what America does _matters_. Directly. To just about everyone. So if you know what's good for you, you better get wise about what it's doing.
Also, most countries are smaller and not spoilt with this kind of power themselves, they know that most of what "is happening" takes place outside your country, so even regular folks takes a certain interest in international affairs even beyond the superpowers, wheras in the US you don't really need to care much about what happens out side it, and are even encouraged to think that all that 'foreign stuff' is mainly irrelevant compared to what goes on in the US.
I'm European, but have lived in the US for a short while, and visited several times since, and I must say the dearth of international news (beyond whatever wars you guys are involved in at any given time) is simply shocking. The rest of us simply cannot afford to be that ignorant.
sudo ergo sum
Oh, and one more thing:
"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."
Umm, there was this tiny little thing called Iraq, where basically noone agreed with you, or believed your claims of evidence. That might not be the impression you got from your domestic media, though.
International opinion was also much quicker to oppose the Vietnam war than the domestic majority.
We all laughed our asses off at how it is possible to let a president's fling almost overthrow the country.
I think you might find also find that international opinion on your christian right and neocons is far less accepting than in the US.
sudo ergo sum
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?
On the internet, you can go off on a tangent and investigate questions you have. On the TV/Radio, you don't have that many chances to branch your train of thought and must accept what they are saying as if it has basis, then possibly read about it in the paper the next morning to validate/debunk their claims.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
There, fixed that for ya. America has a population of ~305,621,847. 57,434,084 (which is 46% of the popular, not 48%, by the way) voted for McCain. 57,434,084 / 305,621,847 = 18.8%. Aside from the 21.4% who voted Obama, we can't really know what the other ~60% of the American population thinks. And if you want to adjust the numbers based on the voting age population only, check this link here.
Oh, it's been investigated. You may not have heard much beyond "it's baseless", because when someone throws a baseless attack that doesn't stick, there's not much more for the press to say.
Would you please cite this? Because the quote I heard after election day was "I barely knew Obama".
Ha ha not a bad idea. Obviously Im conservative, but I cant stand Fox, and they're my last choice for a news outlet. I read CNN mostly because its a good page layout, and provide links to more in-depth coverage thats less biased (Time/Money/SI Swimsuits/etc).
If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think. I cant look at the BBC RSS feed without thinking either US news is incompetent or purposely burying world news. Either excuse is disturbing.
She did ask for clarification.
"In what respect, Charlie?"
I think this one's a bit of a stretch, since the phrase isn't well-defined anyway. The interviewer should have defined the term for the audience if not Palin straight away, but he didn't, because it was a trap.
The Supreme Court one, on the other hand, is a train wreck.
-Dave
Perhaps you should check your facts on the whoppers told by the Obama campaign.
Note that the above link is about all the big lies on BOTH sides. Which still makes the point that BOTH sides produced some pretty uncontested (by the press) deceptions. This was a vicious campaign, and to imply that one side didn't participate in the BS-slinging (although the McCain campaign, IMO, was worse about it) is pretty absurd.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Not only were they unlikely to run a positive story on McCain, but if they did then all other stories on the main page would be negative. If the biz section had a downbeat story on the economy, then the political section would have a McCain story. If the Science section told of some breakthrough, they would run an Obama story in National or Politics.
I worked for CNN.com about 7 years ago. I don't know if it's still this way, but the placement of stories was not done by any political partisans back then -- it was done by story rank. With as many stories as CNN runs and has in their database, all pages were generated from a template that would iterate through and put in the top "n" stories based on the template definition. The top science story or business story appearing on the same page as the top political story and having the tone be positive or negative would be purely coincidental.
Then again, this was several years ago, but I have no reason to believe it would have changed since then.
- Vincit qui patitur.
ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Hollywood, (did I leave any out?) all through McCain in front of the bus months before the election.
Bull. You know who threw McCain in front of the bus this year? He did, by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, by being nominated at the Xcel Center in St. Paul while there were high school kids and old women getting tear gassed outside, and by simply being a Republican presidential candidate at a really bad time to be a Republican presidential candidate.
Hell I saw a ratio of 4-1 Obama ads to McCain ads on TV. Even on FOX.
That's because the Obama campaign raised way more money. You may wish to ask yourself "How is that the Democrats managed to raise more money than the bigoted old white guy party?" You may come up with some surprising answers.
The media won this election for Obama. They didn't report on it. They choose a side and promoted it. So much for reporting the news. They were making the news.
The Democrats were using words like "hope" and "change," while the Republicans were using words like "terrorist" and "anti-American." And you are shocked - SHOCKED - that one of those messages got more air time than the other?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
No intelligence is necessary. What we call "libertarian" ideas now were once held by "liberals". The word "progressive" took on a negative connotation due to the failures of the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party so the left wing stole the term "liberal" for itself-- despite the fact that progressive ideals call for an expansion of government and thus are counter to "classical liberal" ideals every step of the way. With the monarchies that were dominant in the 18th century, the status quo was for authoritarian control of nearly all parts of society; that is why the idea of a small government that answered to the people was considered free ("liberte", if you will) and liberal.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Well, they also completely missed the question (or rather dropped) the question of whether or not Obama is really even eligible to be president, or that one citizen tried to discover if he was through the courts and got thrown out for "having no standing to bring the lawsuit".
The guy published his freaking birth certificate, what more do you want? If the media covers every half-baked nut-job conspiracy theory, there wouldn't be any time left to find out which drunken celebrity was caught exposing genitalia last weekend. And you do realize that the same question was raised and subsequently not covered for McCain too, right?
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/citizen.asp
http://www.snopes.com/politics/mccain/citizen.asp
Could it be that Obama got more positive press coverage because he did fewer stupid things? Like not putting a hold on his campaign to phone Washington about assisting some kind of quick fix to the debt crisis? Like not getting window candy to be his VP? Like trying to bury his medical report/book by releasing it late on the Friday before a long weekend?
While I agree some of the media were pro-Obama, and some were pro-McCain, and Obama has also done some gaff's during the campaign, it really seemed like McCain/Palin just couldn't stop with the gaff's and "dumb" negative campaigning (like putting forth that Obama is pals with a terrorist).
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!