Liberal Media Bias in Election 2008? Really?

It really bugs me when Leftists make the positively ludicrous claim that conservatives are out of line when they note the mainstream media's liberal bias. The Leftists claim that such accusations are unfounded. That whole bias thing is overblown.

A new study more than debunks those remarks by the Leftists; it obliterates them.

Study: McCain coverage mostly negative

The good news for John McCain? He's now receiving as much attention from the national media as his Democratic rival. The bad news? It’s overwhelmingly negative.

Just 14 percent of the stories about John McCain, from the conventions through the final presidential debate, were positive in tone, according to a study released today, while nearly 60 percent were negative — the least favorable coverage of any of the four candidates on the two tickets.

The study, by The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan journalism watchdog organization, examined 2,412 stories from 43 newspapers and cable news shows in the six-week period beginning just after the conventions and ending with the final presidential debate.

“Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments,” the study found. “In many ways, the arc of the media narrative during this phase of the 2008 general election might best be described as a drama in which John McCain acted and Barack Obama reacted.”

Indeed, the increased and increasingly negative media attention for McCain isn’t surprising when looking at how the campaign’s strategy changed since the beginning of the general election.

“We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us,” spokesman Brian Rogers told Politico last month, adding later that “we intend to stay on offense.”

For Barack Obama, the study found coverage “has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so," with 36 percent of the storiees positive in tone, 35 percent mixed, and 29 percent negative.

So do these numbers reveal a pro-Obama bias? Not necessarily, according to the study’s authors.

Rather, they say, the statistics “do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat 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 and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions.”

While McCain left St. Paul, Minn., with mostly positive coverage, Obama started out the same period with mostly negative press. But as things turned in the polls, and especially in articles about detailing the electoral map, Obama’s coverage became more favorable.

Obama’s numbers, in fact, are in line with past presidential candidates around the same time periods in the 2000 and 2004 races. It’s McCain’s coverage that has been extraordinarily negative in tone.

The study's authors are putting a rather weird spin on their findings.

They claim that because Obama has been ahead in the polls, his coverage has been more positive.

That's a load. Obama's coverage is positive when he's down and when he's up. He can do no wrong in the eyes of the lib media, and if he does say or do something clearly to his disadvantage, it's not highlighted.

The authors claim that McCain's excessive negative coverage is McCain's own fault. He gets negative coverage because he's so negative and makes so many mistakes. Come on.

Even given the authors' bias, they do reveal that McCain's coverage has been dramatically more negative than Obama's coverage.

The media have given Obama a pass on so many things. They spin in Obama's favor and ignore matters that should be investigated.

This election has been so different. It hasn't been so one-sided in the past.

It's as if the Left-wing media are so hungry for a Democrat to win the White House that they don't care about appearing biased.

They're on a mission to slam former media darling John McCain and absolutely destroy Sarah Palin. They just don't care.

It's a disgrace, no journalistic integrity. Zero.