Editor claims her own ilk are skewed.

Media was skewed during the election
By Cindy Allen, Managing Editor

The presidential election has been decided, and Americans presented Barack Obama with pretty much a landslide victory.

There will be a lot of analysis of this election — the good parts, the bad parts and the strategies that went into winning and losing.

The media — particularly the national media — will be analyzed and scrutinized as never before. This election provided media viewers the most skewed and advocacy-type of journalism in any presidential election than we’ve ever seen before.

News channels such as MSNBC and NBC went to the extreme in advocating for Obama in this election. Fox News went pretty far — but not as extreme — in advocating for Republican Sen. John McCain, and particularly his VP pick Sarah Palin.

Voters noticed what was going on. According to the Pew Research Center, voters overwhelmingly believe the media wanted Obama to win the presidential election. By a margin of 70 percent, Americans said most journalists wanted to see Obama win.

On election night, an African-American ABC news reporter tearfully declared his own personal satisfaction at Obama’s win.

On Thursday, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews declared it was his job as a journalist to make sure the Obama presidency is a successful one.

Oprah Winfrey — not a news reporter or journalist, but still a highly-respected media figure — went on her show after the election declaring her excitement over the Obama win. She had given him her endorsement a long time ago, but refrained from talking politics on her show during the election. But, now, she says she’s unleashed, so we can expect her to prop up the new president as much as she can.

So, where does this leave the American media consumer?

One of the important roles of the media has been as watchdog over the government. Will the press in general now abandon that role over this historic presidential win?

It’s no secret the media landscape is changing. The Internet has brought in a whole new group of supposed journalists and reporters. Many of them are just partisan hacks — but some of them are pretty good. I suspect Americans will come to rely more on the blogging journalists to actually dig and investigate what is going on with the U.S. government.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well, in my opinion, it’s a bad thing for the media in general to move so far toward any political spectrum. It reminds me of the muckraking days of the late 1800s and early 1900s where most newspapers around at the time were nothing but advocacy hacks for one political party or another.

The broadcast media may be beyond repair as far as its advocacy platforms. Because of the 24-hour news cycle, they have to fill air time with something, and most of the time it’s going to be filled with commentary or opinion. Broadcast media are tending to move more toward celebrity anchors, etc. who don’t actually investigate or do journalism — they just provide analysis.

Newspapers, however, I think can redeem themselves and become true watchdogs again. Newspapers still have a distinct credibility edge on their broadcast counterparts. Newspapers, with their print products and their online products, can and should get back in the business of watchdog journalism. Newspapers have editorial pages in which political opinion can still be expressed; however, newspapers don’t devote the majority of their information package to opinion and analysis the way news networks do.

The mainstream media — of which most newspapers are a part — will still struggle because of the changing media landscape. Staff cutbacks will take away seasoned and credible journalists. But, newspapers can still do the “journalism thing” much better than their broadcast counterparts, and it’s my hope they will get back to the job of watching over what the government is doing.

Journalists today have some real gut-checking to do. While all journalists, as Americans, want our country to be successful, it is not “our job” to ensure our country’s success. It is not “our job” to ensure our president’s success or our governor’s success.

It is our job to provide the public with credible, factual information about what is going on with their government and their government officials. If we don’t embrace that role again, we are doing a disservice to our country.

quote:

It is our job to provide the public with credible, factual information about what is going on with their government and their government officials. If we don’t embrace that role again, we are doing a disservice to our country.

You mean like when Judith Miller of the NY Times printed lies provided to her by the administration about WMD's in Iraq to help sell the war? Or maybe all the cable and network news talking heads riding into Baghdad with the troops talking about what a clean operation and flawless military exercise it was?

As a liberal, watching news coverage was more than frustrating. Anyone remeber the CNN fact checks? Accuracy lost to fairness every step of the way. MCain & Obama each give a stump speech, CNN fact checks one item from each, verdict; McCain FALSE, Obama: TRUE.

Now, of course there were times when each was MISLEADING. What we NEVER saw were the final tallies. Having spent a great deal of time online fact checking, and watching a great deal of stump speeches. The real story was never told, in the attempt to be fair.

Obama could give a 20 minute speech, containing 2 misleading statements. McCain gives a 20 minute speech conatining 12 FALSE statements and 4 MISLEADING statements. But in FAIRNESS Only one statement from each speech is fact checked. From the Conventions on, this was the tone of the entire campaign.

McCain got hours and hours of coverage over the William Ayers connection. Yet, that connection was asked, and answered months earlier. Everything about that relationship had been gone through more thouroughly than a colonoscopy, and anyone with the ability to read had dismissed it as empty. Given this FACT, the media should have thrown this back in the face of the McCain campaign, yet they never did. Damn near every attack McCain threw at Obama was baseless and inflamatory, but the media just played along, as if it was news.

Mark my words, the McCain campaign will go down in modern history as being the most misleading and devisive. The media stayed far away from reporting the "facts" and stuck to repeating talking points. Individual fact-checking confirms McCain's constant inability to stick to the truth. Thank God enough Americans took it upon themselves to seek out the truth, via the internet, and saw that this once good man, had spiraled into a dishonorable bafoon.

Cindy's remarks only echo the findings of an INDEPENDENT STUDY which revealed consistent anti-McCain bias in the TV media.

BTW, isn't saying a female can't do something "like a man" kind of sexist? I'm sure it's just a figure of speech, but conservatives seem to get burned all the time for using "figures of speech" that are perceived as racist or sexist.

The perceptions of the viewers has been very interesting. Given that McCain was on the attack, and spewing negative remarks on a minute by miute basis, it would be hard for any viewer to remember "positive" coverage of him. In the closing weeks of the campaign, every media outlet was hard pressed to find any video of a McCain speech that was uplifting, encouraging, or uniting. Simply showing a Palin or McCain stump speech resulted in a negative impression....because that was all they were doing!

The hardest hitting interviews McCain had were on The View and David Letterman. These two interviews were the only ones asking the hard questions that American's were asking themselves. Something is very wrong with that. Those were the questions that should have been asked by Anderson Cooper, Charlie Gibson, and George Stephanapolous. Yet our prominent news media lobbed softballs and failed at follow-up.

Yeah, Palin got treated with kid-gloves by the media too!

I read this and at first thought it was a joke. But after reading to the end and no punchline I came to realize it was just another pundit speaking on behalf of their republican fantasy.
Barack Obama won by a landslide not because of the media but in spite of it. He won because the republican administration has brought the country to a place noone could have imagined just a few short 8 years ago.
He won because the administration doesn't know how to balance a budget check or fight a war. He won because this administration was willing to give up the citizens freedom for a false sense of security. He won because John McCain put country last in order to win an election by resorting to fear tactics and choosing a running mate that had to put a pit in his own stomach.
Barack Obama won because the republican party leaders lost their way and the citizens of this land became the real losers.
You can whine and point your fingers all you want but there are more fingers pointing back at you and that is where the blame lies with the republicans and every American that didn't hold them accountable.

quote:

Originally posted by ParosGearDown:
Yeah, Palin got treated with kid-gloves by the media too!

I believe and it can be proven that McCain's own inner circle gave her more grieve than anyone.

I'm simply amazed at this little minority on the Left still pretending that election coverage of Obama was remotely competent. In my workplace, I knew five individuals who for sure voted for Obama, and a week before the election not one of them had ever heard of Ayers, Rezko, Khalidi, Alinsky, etc. Even the Washington Post ombudsman says:

"But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager."

The ENE Editor was right on the money regarding duties of the Press, and they have been found wanting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...AR2008110702895.html

By Deborah Howell
Sunday, November 9, 2008; Page B06

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

This Story
OMBUDSMAN: An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage
Stumped: Objective Doesn't Mean an Equal Dosage of Positive and Negative
My assistant, Jean Hwang, and I have been examining Post coverage since Nov. 11 of last year on issues, voters, fundraising, the candidates' backgrounds and horse-race stories on tactics, strategy and consultants. We also have looked at photos and Page 1 stories since Obama captured the nomination June 4.

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that.

McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.

Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos. In black and white photos, the nominees were about even, with McCain at 149 and Obama at 147. On Page 1, they were even at 26 each. Post photo and news editors were surprised by my first count on Aug. 3, which showed a much wider disparity, and made a more conscious effort at balance afterward.

Some readers complain that coverage is too poll-driven. They're right, but it's not going to change. The Post's polling was on the mark, and in some cases ahead of the curve, in focusing on independent voters, racial attitudes, low-wage voters, the shift of African Americans' support from Clinton to Obama and the rising importance of economic issues. The Post and its polling partner ABC News include 50 to 60 issues questions in every survey instead of just horse-race questions, so public attitudes were plumbed as well.

The Post had a hard-working team on the campaign. Special praise goes to Dan Balz, the best, most level-headed, incisive political reporter and analyst in newspapers. His stories and "Dan Balz's Take" on washingtonpost.com were fair, penetrating and on the mark. His mentor, David S. Broder, was as sharp as ever.

Michael Dobbs, the Fact Checker, also deserves praise for parsing campaign rhetoric for the overblown or just flat wrong. Howard Kurtz's Ad Watch was a sharp reality check.

The Post's biographical pieces, especially the first ones -- McCain by Michael Leahy and Obama by David Maraniss -- were compelling. Maraniss demystified Obama's growing-up years; the piece on his mother and grandparents was a great read. Leahy's first piece on McCain's father and grandfather, both admirals, told me where McCain got his maverick ways as a kid -- right from the two old men.

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

The Post had good coverage of voters, mainly by Krissah Williams Thompson and Kevin Merida. Anne Hull's stories from Florida, Michigan and Liberty University, and Wil Haygood's story from central Montana brought readers into voters' lives. Jose Antonio Vargas's pieces about campaigns and the Internet were standouts.

One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama's running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission. However, I do not agree with those readers who thought The Post did only hatchet jobs on her. There were several good stories on her, the best on page 1 by Sally Jenkins on how Palin grew up in Alaska.

In early coverage, I wasn't a big fan of the long-running series called "The Gurus" on consultants and important people in the campaigns. The Post has always prided itself on its political coverage, and profiles of the top dogs were probably well read by political junkies. But I thought the series was of no practical use to readers. While there were some interesting pieces in The Frontrunners series, none of them told me anything about where the candidates stood on any issue.

Right we heard every day about McCain's wife's drug problem, The Keating five, his gambling, zipper problems,ties to domestic terrorism(G. Gordon Felon, who advocated ATF agents to be shot in the head,)He and his wife's family connection to mob figures. The POW's families agaisnt John McCain. I was exhausted from reading all those stories day in and day out. And all that pandering to the far right and flip flops on his stances.
I can see why you people are Faux news junkies. To quote Jack Nicholson, YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH"

Now who is it that controls the media?
http://www.corporations.org/media/

Yes and the "fair" way the media covered Sarah Palin's family problems and her lack of turning over her medical records. They were so cruel and mean at the way they hounded away of the examples being set by her pregnant teenage daughter, her husbands ties to secession advocates,(we heard him speak all the time and really got to know all about him)They really would have handled Barack Obama sooooooooooo differently if he had went to 5 colleges before graduating, if he had a pregnant teenage daughter and if his wife only had a high school education and was kept from the media and if Joe Biden had refused interviews and requested special treatment by the interviewers and had walked out of interviews(don't forget Campbell Brown)THE ELECTION WOULD HAVE TURNED OUT SOOOOOOOOOO DIFFERENTLY.

Here's a challenge for you, Sandra. Link to one single, solitary media study that shows a conservative bias in the media. I can link to studies showing liberal bias, newspapers such as the NYT and Washington Post admitting bias, etc., but I'll bet you can't find one.

pLEASE READ ABOVE POSTS