Media bias

Coming back around to this subject...

http://www.comcast.net/articles/tv/20081031/Campaign.Media/

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Not surprising at all. Although I think this has less to do with a political agenda from TV media, and more to do with the marketability of the subject at hand. Obama comes across as a trendy rockstar type, and McCain is the crotchety old man. From a personality perspective, as well as the history-making minority-in-the-White-House angle, Obama is a far more interesting person to cover. If McCain loses the election, the GOP has a legitimate case in simply stating that the more novel celebrity had the advantage.

Of course, if we look at the number of entertainers and athletes that have taken prominent political positions in the past, I don't think either party would have the right to say that this election is any more a sham than those in the past. Until we can fix that part of the system, this will continue to be a problem... and as our society becomes even more dependent on the media, and continues to show an addiction to novel or outrageous programming, we can't expect it to change. An intelligent, forward-thinking political party would be justified in using this change to its advantage, rather than sitting back and complaining about it. For better or worse, this is where the GOP has begun to lose touch with the American people.... but those are the ones casting the votes.

kuzi16

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=6099188

Fourtotheflush

Dont forget we had an actual ACTOR in the white house for 8 years in the 80's. So the media does play its part and it swings both ways.
Im sure that if the war was over and the economy was great, Mcain would be a much more endearing character... but theyre not.

PuroFreak

Actually, the media wasn't all that friendly with President Reagan. The New York Times ran this clip after the famous "Tear down this wall" Speach.

“A Potemkin President: Reagan is losing the air of authority,” declared one column in The New York Times, before the writer went on to announce that the presidency was “ceasing to function” and predict, “19 months of a surreal Presidency to go. If it lasts.”

The leftist bias in this country isn't a totally new thing, it has just grown by epic proportions during this campaign.

phobicsquirrel

In a country that elected bush not once (which some would argue wasn't really elected...) but twice (after being lied too, after invading a country, after...) I'm sure that if the economy wasn't in such ruin, that yes McCain would probably be up at this point. Why? Because people in the country seem to go with the negative and bashing (whether or not it is true) than what really matters, issues and how to fix them. I'm not saying that I love obama, and I actually am not that big on mccain but all in all I do think that the media makes the election process a circus. I do think if Mccain would have stuck with his plan that he started several months ago that he would be doing better right now. just my 2 cents.

kuzi16

click
the first few lines are kind of the point. the rest of the story is, well, another story.

phobicsquirrel

That just about sums it up, I wish people would just report the news and leave all the BS out of it. Anyway I'm hoping that clean energy will come full frontal in the next 10 years. That is something that needs to be done, not to mention bring the US back to the table when it comes to exports.

urbino

Yup.

Luko

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/media-credibility/

jlzimmerman

Anyone with a half decent IQ can easily detect how the media sways. My thoughts....

Fox - Leans right

ABC, NBC, CBS - Leans left

CNN - Most non-bias of all networks

Washington Post - Leans left

Wasthington Times - Leans right

New York Times - Leans left

New York Post - Leans right

kuzi16

Washington Post: we were biased for Obama

nice

kuzi16

interesting

i wanna see this. not so much to "prove that there is media bias" but more to see if they did a good job or not. at worst it should be a good discussion piece.

urbino

kuzi16:
Washington Post: we were biased for Obama

nice

I'm not sure I buy her argument. Okay, they published more positive stories about Obama than they did about McCain. What does that tell us? Not much, really.

Does it mean they had an ideological bias toward Obama, or does it mean Obama ran a better campaign than McCain did? Either one explains the data equally well, and nearly everyone I've heard, even Republicans, agrees that Obama ran a great campaign and McCain ran a terrible one.

Does it mean they had an ideological bias toward Obama, or does it mean Obama actually had better ideas and proposals than McCain? This is a difficult question to answer, given that the definition of "better" in this context is inherently ideological. Consider a hypothetical campaign in which one of the major parties ran a fairly ordinary, middle-of-the-road, Midwestern governor, and the other ran a diagnosed psychotic who was simultaneously active in the KKK and the Stalin Youth. Presumably, there would be more positive stories about the first candidate than about the second. Would that reflect an ideological bias, or the simple fact that one candidate, in fact, had better ideas, and the other one had worse ideas?

Now, clearly, the differences between McCain and Obama were nowhere near that large. Nonetheless, there still is such a thing as better ideas and worse ideas. If WaPo's reporters, in the course of investigating the 2 sets of proposals (to whatever degree journalists actually investigate anything anymore), found that Obama's proposals did a better job of describing our current reality and suggesting ways to deal with it, what are they supposed to do? Lie, in the interest of evenhandedness?

Her other point was that their op-ed page favored Obama. This seems like a complete non-point, to me. It's an op-ed page. It's supposed to take a position. WaPo's op-ed page always endorses the Democrat; I don't see why it's remarkable that they did it again this year. And if their conservative columnists weren't as keen on McCain as the liberal ones were on Obama, didn't that pretty accurately reflect the voting public's feelings about their 2 candidates? Liberals were thrilled about Obama, conservatives were pretty unexcited about McCain.

All that said, it's common knowledge that WaPo tilts liberal, and I don't dispute that. What I have a problem with is the notion that what their ombudsperson said in that article in any way proves it. Proof is available, but that ain't it.

kuzi16

it wasnt so much that they were "proving it"
it was more that they were "admitting it"

I do agree that the article was not proving that they are biased. I dont usually think that the WaPo is very well written (as far as news print goes) or that they do a particularly good job of presenting the news in general. Thats why i dont read them.
and many others are stopping as well, as Frank Ahrens (Washington post staff writer) said on October 31, 2008:

Circulation of the Monday-Saturday editions of The Post dropped 2.4 percent through the first nine months of the year, with Sunday circulation dropping 3.6 percent.

they have been dropping in readers for months on end, maybe even years. (i didnt bother to look THAT far into it.)

there are some who claim this drop in readership is due to their glaring bias.

i dont think its just the Washington Post.

this was my last post on this thread:

kuzi16:
interesting

i wanna see this. not so much to "prove that there is media bias" but more to see if they did a good job or not. at worst it should be a good discussion piece.

im not sure if you saw that or not or were willing to comment but i think it should be interesting to see. I cant really tell from a clip (that is designed to get the Conservative base all fired up to go out and see this film) if it will be good or not or if they did a good job or not but like i said it should be a good discussion piece.

Luko

The perponderance of evidence points to a liberal media bias. Not just among new outlets as organizations, but among individual reporters. I read (and can dig up) an MSNBC report that addressed political contributions by print and broadcast reporters and something like 90 percent of them made donations to democratic candidates.

There is a strong media bias toward the left. It has an impact.

About the circulation drop, it's been happening to newspapers across the country for the last 20 years or so, mirroring the rise of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle. I don't think the Post's bias plays into that at all.

urbino

kuzi16:
it wasnt so much that they were "proving it"
it was more that they were "admitting it"

I do agree that the article was not proving that they are biased.

Yeah, I was taking issue more with the article itself than I was with what you were saying, kuz. She throws this data out there as if it means something; as if there's a "supposed to" that says news outlets have to run equal numbers of positive and negative stories on every person and every issue. That's nonsense, and nobody -- not even the people who cry loudest about liberal media bias -- would want things to be that way.

There is no obligation for the press to find nice things to report about somebody who's saying silly or dangerous or factually wrong things. The obligation of the press is to report what people are saying and, as best it can determine, whether that is factually accurate or makes sense.

Take a recent example. Ever since the election, "liberal" media sources have said over and over again that "America is a center-right nation," and therefore the new president and congress had better stay center-rightish or they'll lose the people.

Now. Are they saying that because they have a center-right bias, or are they saying it because it aligns with the facts? I don't know the answer to that. What bothers me about it is none of them ever explain what facts they base it on; they just say it. If it is in fact true that America is a center-right nation, the fact that the press keeps saying it and never says America is a center-left nation does not indicate an ideological bias. They're just reporting the facts. They aren't obligated to counter that fact by saying something factually inaccurate in order to be "balanced."

kuzi16:
this was my last post on this thread:
kuzi16:
interesting

i wanna see this. not so much to "prove that there is media bias" but more to see if they did a good job or not. at worst it should be a good discussion piece.
im not sure if you saw that or not or were willing to comment but i think it should be interesting to see. I cant really tell from a clip (that is designed to get the Conservative base all fired up to go out and see this film) if it will be good or not or if they did a good job or not but like i said it should be a good discussion piece.

I hear ya, but, honestly, the media just isn't a subject I find terribly interesting. I had a bug in my butt about that specific WaPo article because it was a case of such bad, muddled thinking.