Political Bloviation

File this under “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Why McCain is getting hosed in the press - John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei - Politico.com
…Obama had more than twice as many positive stories (36 percent) as McCain — and just half the percentage of negative (29 percent).

You call that balanced?

…There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Politico was not included in the Pew study. But our researcher Alex Burns pulled out his highlighter pen and did his own study of Politico’s October stories last week: 110 stories advanced a narrative that was more favorable to Obama than McCain. Sixty-nine did the opposite.

So they seem to believe that delivering an accurate picture of the race is more important than forcing balance on an unbalanced reality. That seems so familiar, yet foreign. What is that called again? Oh yeah, it’s called reporting. Maybe some other outlets ought to try that, you know, just for a change.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS