There is such an incredible level of bias in most mainstream news media coverage in favor of Barack Obama that even the Clintons complained about not getting a fair shake during the Democratic Primary. You know it must be way out of balance when the smooth-talking Bill Clinton, the darling of the 1990s, is thrown under the bus in favor of somebody even more smooth-talking.
Howard Kurtz reported (Oct. 22) on a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that showed that “media coverage of John McCain has been heavily unfavorable since the political conventions, more than three times as negative as the portrayal of Barack Obama.” In all, 57% of print and broadcast stories about John McCain were “decidedly negative” while only 14% were positive. Contrast that with Barack Obama’s coverage during that period: “36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative.”
Kurtz continues:
The Wall Street meltdown appears to have been a turning point for both candidates. Thirty-four percent of the stories about Obama’s reaction to the crisis were positive, while 18 percent were negative. McCain’s coverage, though, went into a free fall after he initially declared that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” By the following week, more than half the stories about McCain were negative and only 11 percent positive, just as Obama’s coverage was turning positive by a margin of more than 5 to 1.
Kurtz’s concluding paragraph offers this statement:
While some will seize on these findings as evidence that the media are pro-Obama, the study says they actually contain “a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls . . .”
I will go a step further and state that many in the media are pro-Obama and clearly so. I feel that their pro-Obama enthusiasm carries over to the mechanics of polls and the interpretation of polling data.
Michael Barone wrote an intriguing article (Oct. 22) entitled “Are the Polls Accurate?” with a subtitle “Reading them right is more art than science.” Barone maintains that we can trust polls but “with qualifications.” He then points out several inherent imperfections in political polling that can cause under-representation for some candidates and over-representation for others. Sampling errors can be introduced by cell phone-only households, pollsters not calling back, and respondents refusing to answer questions. These factors can skew results. Also, it seems that during the Democratic Primary, some people didn’t want to admit they did not vote for the rock star-like Obama and so exit polling was higher than actual results.
That brings me to my final point in this article. Most people are probably familiar with the polls that show a large Obama lead over McCain; however, two polls (AP-Ipsos and AP-Gfk) released on October 22 suggest that the Presidential race is essentially tied with Obama at 44% and McCain at 43%. These polls showed that the race tightened after the third debate (which is something I predicted would happen).
Key takeaways from the AP-Ipsos poll are these: Read More…
Posted under Barack Obama, Campaign, John McCain
This post was written by PonderstormMike on October 23, 2008
