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huangshan -> RE: Washington Post admits to Obama overcoverage (8/21/2008 10:29:35 PM)
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ORIGINAL: henny
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ORIGINAL: huangshan
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ORIGINAL: Dubya
How's this for an admission of media bias? LINK.
With all the media exposure it is interesting that Obama just can't get much of a boost in the polls.[8|]
If I recall, Obama gets the lion's share of the coverage, but most of it is negative.
I agree with this.
Obama gets more coverage, but the McCain camp is much better at making negative things "stick" in the media as well as at grabbing headlines.
For the past month or so, for example, the MCCain camp will float a criticism of Obama, and that criticism will reverberate in the media, grabbing headlines. The Obama camp responds, of course, but the response is always buried within the article, while the criticism is the headline.
Most of the time the headline is all anyone will see, and it's enough to make the criticism on its own, regardless of if the criticism lacks evidence or is unfair, as people will forget it a few days later once its unfairness or erroneousness is exposed, and everyone has already moved on to the next thing. All that will stick in their brain is "Obama bad."
The Obama camp will try to retaliate, but usually they are either too slow or their criticisms will be less "Sensational" than the McCain camp (so for example, part of the reason why the Paris Hilton ad was in the media for so long and got so much attention was its outrageousness and newness -which gives it a certain sensational aspect that the media loves to talk about and debate).
The ironic thing about Republicans crying "bias" in the media is that while I have no doubt that most journalists lean liberal, the Republicans have always been much better at manipulating the media to get messages out. To the point that, the idea that the media is biased (however untrue or true it may be) has actually become one of their biggest political weapons. Blaming the media, whether it's untrue or true, is always a positive campaign tactic for any republican candidate (McCain does it all the time), as it makes themselves out to be "underdogs" and "victims" all while strengthening their base.
Plus, I don't think there's any denying that had Obama made some of the missteps on Iraq that McCain had made in the early days (i.e. confusing Sunnis and Shiites, confusing the boarders, etc) he would be completely massacred. The election would have been over for him, but McCain seems much more able to survive it. I'm not sure if that's due merely to Obama's newness, the Obama campaign's reluctance to attack boldly, or something else.
Here is a recent exchange in the media:
JIM LEHRER: Yes. What about the McCain lobbyist who lobbied for Georgia and is now McCain’s number-one foreign affairs adviser? Is that going to come up to bite McCain more, do you think?
RUTH MARCUS: So the Obama campaign hopes. I look at this on two different levels. On the substantive level, anybody who knows Senator McCain knows that he would have the same views on Georgia no matter what lobbyist came to talk to him. He feels this one in his bones. And he wasn’t going to — this is not a shift in position because some lobbyist came and whispered in his ear.
Here is analysis of this by Matthew Yglesias:
It’s worth noting the extraordinary level of benefit of the doubt that John McCain tends to get from the press, including from people who aren’t necessarily hugely sympathetic to his policy agenda. Normally reporters are ruthless about the motives behind politicians’ decisions, but everything McCain does is above question. Beyond that, how much better is it for McCain to be the kind of guy whose views on U.S.-Russia relations are identical to those that you would have if you were a paid agent of a foreign government? Of course it’s possible that America’s interests vis-à-vis Russia are identical to Georgia’s interests, but that doesn’t seem very likely to me.
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