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Friday, October 10, 2008
Does press support for Obama give him an inappropriate advantage?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
An interesting question was asked at the presidential debate in Nashville: “What don’t you know, and how will you learn it?”
If what you don’t know is why Barack Obama has received more press coverage than John McCain, perhaps I can lend a hand.
Obama came into the national scene as a virtual unknown; McCain has been around for decades. Obama was locked in the closest primary race in history against another historical candidate. McCain wrapped up his nomination months earlier, so there was no story to cover.
“I get it!” the formerly confused among you (very few folks, I imagine) are saying to themselves. “It’s why Sarah Palin has received so much more press coverage this fall than Joe Biden. They don’t like her better — she’s just more newsworthy!”
My colleague’s stats only tell us how easily one equates coverage with support when it involves the opposition. Forget the Summer of Love — remember the Summer of Wright? Obama’s connection with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright dominated the news for weeks on end. Oh, and tell Bill Clinton about the Democrats’ “massive advantage.” I’m sure he’d love to know that what felt like a nearly career-ending investigation of his dalliance with Gennifer Flowers was just a figment of his imagination.
Top-rated FOX News views Obama as a Baby Daddy prone to “terrorist fist jabs.” The New York Times recently analyzed its own record; they’ve published 20 “tough” articles on Obama, compared with 13 on McCain. So what’s really going on here? McCain is grabbing onto that tried-and-true lifeline, “Us vs. Them” politics. The economy is in freefall. Who cares? Obama worked on poverty and education issues with a former radical! Russia and Pakistan pose real threats to our safety. Who cares? Obama refused to support a redundant bill created to undermine Roe V. Wade!
If the two campaigns didn’t know how much Americans care about Obama and Bill Ayers or McCain and the Keating Five before, they sure learned in Nashville. There, not a single citizen reporter used his or her moment in the sun for character assassination, demanding instead answers and leadership. So, panicking blame-gamers— can we stop all this and get back to the issues now? Our future demands it.
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Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
“Inappropriate” does not begin to describe how freely the press has campaigned for Sen. Barack Obama. The statistics from Pew Research’s Project for Excellence in Journalism are damning — and infuriating.
Pew regularly tallies weekly media attention to each candidate, and also tries to determine the media’s subjective spin by surveying people to find out which candidate they think they heard more about in the news that week. This year, it wasn’t until the first week of August that the statistical media coverage was even similar. (The end of July stats were more typical, with 83 percent of campaign stories featuring Obama, to 51 percent featuring Sen. John McCain.) But even in August, the subjective perception wasn’t close: 76 percent of people said they had heard most about Obama compared with McCain’s 11 percent.
Without conservative ombudsmen to catch ideological bias, largely liberal reporters find their personal excitement about Obama creeping into their stories. NBC correspondent Lee Cowan was honest enough to admit that it is “almost hard to remain objective [about Obama] because it is infectious…” He later told the New York Times, “In the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid. It’s so rapturous, everything around him.”
According to a July Rasmussen report, nearly half of those polled think they have drunk the Kool-Aid: 49 percent believe reporters will try to help Obama win the election, just 24 percent think reporters attempt unbiased coverage, and a delusional 14 percent think the media is trying to help McCain win.
The main concern is reporters repeatedly ignoring Obama stories that raise important red flags. As just two examples, Obama’s relationship with unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers remains “underground” or is minimized as “they hardly knew each other” (when that is demonstrably not true) instead of triggering a journalistic investigation into ideological similarities. (Can you imagine the media ignoring a similar story about John McCain?) And Obama’s repulsive votes against the Illinois Born Alive Infants Protection Act are not even on the mainstream media’s radar.
This media imbalance inevitably creates a massive advantage for Obama — or any Democrat. In such an environment, it is a testimony to the overwhelming conservativism of America that conservative presidents ever get elected.