Obama's Publicists

Obama's Publicists




By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Journalism: Have the feeling Barack Obama gets more favorable coverage than John McCain? It's not just a perception, it's a reality, according to yet another study confirming media bias.


The right-of-center sector of the blogosphere has for months maintained that the mainstream media are "in the tank" for Obama. The observant bloggers were right.

"Coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable — and has become more so over time," says a Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism study that looked at newspapers and cable news shows from the end of the conventions to the last presidential debate. Coverage of Obama, naturally, was much more positive than negative or neutral. His ratio of favorable stories to overall stories was more than 2 1/2 times as large as McCain's.

The second most unfavorable coverage went not to McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, but to Obama's, Joe Biden. "Limited coverage" of the Delaware senator "was far more negative than Palin's, and nearly as negative as McCain's." The small sample size makes any conclusion irrelevant, though.

The study called Biden "nearly the invisible man" because he's been largely ignored. In our view, his frequent gaffes should earn him extended negative coverage, but he's gotten a pass. Scornful reporting is reserved for Republicans such as Palin, who got bad press in 39% of the stories about her. Only 28% were positive, a third neutral.

Such bias against Republicans is institutional. The Media Research Center found that between the end of the primaries and Tuesday, network news broadcast 84 stories criticizing McCain ads while only 32 had a negative tone toward Obama ads. And the Center for Media and Public Affairs notes that the GOP ticket is the butt of late-night comic jokes seven times as often as the Democratic pair.

Despite the one-sided coverage in favor of their party, some Democrats won't be happy until they have shut down any opposition and shredded the First Amendment. Among them is Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who shares his party's eagerness to reinstate the clearly unconstitutional Fairness Doctrine. This is the Federal Communications Commission rule that once required broadcasters to give equal time to all sides on public issues.

"My thought is that radio and media generally should have a higher calling than just to reflect a particular point of view," Bingaman recently told an Albuquerque radio station, apparently forgetting that the rule of law and America's foundational documents are our guiding principles, not what he thinks.

Should Obama be elected and the Democrats gain large majorities in both congressional chambers, we expect the Fairness Doctrine, scrapped in 1987, to be resurrected.

To paraphrase a note from one of our contributors: Who knew the Democrats were closet totalitarians? We'll all know, however, when constitutionally guaranteed free speech is snuffed out.