Ad Week recently had a featured article on one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.
But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable—and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one—the most unfavorable of all four candidates—according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
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 of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.
Whoops, that wasn’t Ad Week, it was the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism. (How you have the words “excellence” and “journalism” in the same title is beyond me.)
That’s a newsflash for you, the media is biased.
LGF:
It’s just something that sort of happens, I guess, and the media reports on it like they report everything else, without any sense of responsibility or embarrassment. Then they go right back to writing hit pieces.
(via memeorandum)
Given that the newspapers surveyed will undoubtedly all endorse (or have already endorsed) Sen. Obama, this is is one more piece of evidence that the “wall” between the editorial and reporting staffs of newspapers is largely a myth. The reporters look for the stories that will support the editorial position of the paper.
While there’s no doubt that the markets hurt Sen. McCain, is there anything in Sen. Obama’s performance to show that he could handle the meltdown other than his legendary unflappability?
So it comes down to PR that comes not from the campaigns, but from the supposedly neutral arbiters of our society.
Wow, so the media did a study and showed that it’s biased during the time that Sen. McCain slid in the polls. Who would have thought?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
