Which came first?
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism released its latest report on media coverage of the presidential campaign and its results should come as no surprise to anyone who's been conscious the past one and a half months.
The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.
Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.
But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates—according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.
For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.
Why is this? According to Pew, it's not the result of any liberal bias.
What we see in these findings, above all, are two phenomena. The first is the focus on tactics and strategy. The candidate who was perceived to be winning this year got better coverage. We have seen that pattern before. In 2000, our research saw George Bush receiving more positive coverage than Gore. In 2004, our studies of a narrower time frame saw Kerry enjoying better coverage, as polls perceived his closing the gap on Bush.
The second phenomenon is an almost instantaneous reinforcing and echoing effect of the press. Presidential elections are now so heavily polled, with various daily tracks and compilations of state-by-state polls, that every campaign event is almost instantly measured for its political impact and that in turn is immediately analyzed by the political press. Each event has in a sense three echoes. The event is covered. The effect is measured. And the reaction to that measurement by the campaigns is then examined and covered.
So, according to Pew, something bad happens to McCain which pushes his polls down, which causes the media to report on the downward polling, which McCain's polls to go down, et cetera, ad infinitum. Of course, Pew doesn't entertain the possibility that the first "something bad" that happened to McCain had anything to do with media coverage in the first place. It's as though the egg just appeared out of nothingness -- there was no rooster-hen hanky-panky that proceeded it.
Setting the bias issue aside for a moment. The most depressing part of the entire Pew report from the perspective of someone who truly cares about journalism was this graph:
The political horse race made up 53 percent. Coverage of the candidates policies constituted only 20 percent of the reporting.
Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.
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The media has been extremely unfair to Sen. Mc Cain. Obama, who many thought was the winning candidate, received much better coverage. Mc Cain's coverage, for the most part, has been extremely negative from not only the press, but from those liberal socialist illuminatis.