11-24-2008, 01:14 AM
swampy wrote:
[quote=Carnos Jax]
With respect Swampy, if there was pro-Obama bias, it was only because McCain ran a FAR more negative campaign. Therefore one can't help but think that those who run more negative campaign ads get more negative attention from the press, especially when the campaign attacks seemed hypocritically baseless.
That's not what the article said. Carnos. Did you read the short article?
"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her.
The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin."
It's not a matter of ad campaigns, his article was about bias reportage.
I'll grant you that that article on Cindy McCain was not balanced. But I doubt that it changed any significant number of votes. And I will grant you that toward the end the reporting was more favorable to Obama. But I do think as others have said that the reason for that is more about the poor quality of McCain's campaign than from an inherent bias. Being balanced does not imply that you have to make each candidate look equally good in the eyes of the voters.
And if you look at the campaign in its total, there were significant chunks of time when the press was giving McCain a pass on things that if Obama had done or said they would have jumped all over it. For example, TWICE McCain mistakenly said that al Quaeda in Iraq was being trained in Iran. That was totally ridiculous - al Queada and the Iranians don't get along at all (to say the least). If Obama had made that mistake you can be sure that it would have been a major story, but with McCain it was like, oops, oh well, no big deal. During Obama's trip to Iraq and Europe there was a spell where the news organizations were acting almost like straight forward conduits of the McCain campaign's slime-a-day attacks without critically examining the claims. Obama was making almost no mistakes so the McCain campaign was just making stuff up day after day and the major news networks uncritically went along with it. You could say that was "balanced" reporting because so many of the images from Obama's trip were so positive so they were just reporting what the McCain campaign had to say about it as to be balanced. But as I said, balanced should not imply merely regurgitating what one campaign says. News organizations need to state when one campaign is lying about the other. For a long time they didn't do that. They gave the McCain campaign a pass time after time on their lies. That emboldened them to be even more egregious about the lies so that when the press finally stopped being a simple conduit of falsehoods and started calling them on it, they looked pretty bad.