t.nie
Patience Tester
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Pew Research Shows Media Definitely In The Tank For Obama.
Examples of the medias attempt to influence the presidential election has been shown numerous times, here and elsewhere online, but Pew Research takes it a step further and shows exactly how in the tank the media is for Barack Obama.
For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.
For McCain, by comparison, nearly six-in-ten stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two-in-ten (14%) were positive.
Journalism.org shows that Palin, unlike what the media likes to report, has not been a drag on the McCain/Palin ticket at all:
As for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, her coverage had an up and down trajectory, moving from quite positive, to very negative, to more mixed. What drove that tone toward a more unfavorable light was probing her public record and her encounters with the press. Little of her trouble came from coverage of her personal traits or family issues. In the end, she also received less than half the coverage of either presidential nominee, though about triple that of her vice presidential counterpart, Joe Biden.
The findings suggest that, in the end, Palin’s portrayal in the press was not the major factor hurting McCain. Her coverage, while tilting negative, was far more positive than her running mate’s.
Thanks to reader Kim R, we also see that despite the media's obvious attempts to harm John McCain in favor of Barack Obama, the IBD/TIPP Tracking Poll, which in 2004, the Final Certified Results for TIPP showed them to be the "most accurate pollster of the campaign season", has the polling numbers far closer than has been reported to date.
IBD/TIPP Poll shows a sudden tightening of Obama's lead to 3.7 from 6.0. McCain has picked up 3 points in the West and with independents, married women and those with some college. He's also gaining momentum in the suburbs, where he's gone from dead even a week ago to a 20-point lead.
Looks like despite the media trying to insist to everyone that the race is over, the voters and respondents of the polls know the media is in the tank for Obama according to another Pew Research piece titled "Most Voters Say News Media Wants Obama to Win."
Voters overwhelmingly believe that the media wants Barack Obama to win the presidential election. By a margin of 70%-9%, Americans say most journalists want to see Obama, not John McCain, win on Nov. 4. Another 8% say journalists don't favor either candidate, and 13% say they don't know which candidate most reporters support.
The Pew Research center claims to be non-partisan, which I guess is supposed to make appear un-biased, but in reality it is a right wing think tank funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. If they find the media to be biased, it's because they started off from a bias of their own, and that was to find the media biased towards the left.
Believe me, if McCain were winning the polls, they would be lauding all of the media as being "fair and balanced" instead of using their own slanted criteria for determining what was a "negative" report on McCain, a "positive" report on Obama, or anything in between.
Here is the Wiki entry, I think it pretty much outlines where the non-partisan Pew Research Center is coming from.
Joseph Pew and his heirs were politically conservative. The J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust had as its mission to "acquaint the American people with 'the evils of bureaucracy' and 'the values of a free market' and 'to inform our people of the struggle, persecution, hardship, sacrifice and death by which freedom of the individual was won.'" Joseph N. Pew, Jr. called Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, "a gigantic scheme to raze U.S businesses to a dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs."[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pew_Charitable_Trusts
As far as the polls, who cares. It just seems completely ridiculous that all the right wing pundits can find for good news is "we're still losing, just not by as much."