Now They Tell Us: Media Admits to Pro-Obama Bias

Posted by: Tristan

During the Presidential campaign, conservatives were complaining long and hard that the mainstream media was explicitly biased towards Obama and against McCain.

After the campaign ended, media analysis outlets reported a media-wide bias for Obama.

And now the media itself is admitting that it was in Obama’s corner the whole time.  Washington Post Ombudsman, Deborah Howell was the first to admit to her paper’s pro-Obama bias in election coverage.

In a second column, she cited examples of this bias.

· The Post put on Page 1 two long stories about “Troopergate” — the allegation that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin fired her state’s public safety commissioner because he wouldn’t dismiss her ex-brother-in-law from his state trooper’s job. One of the Page 1 stories reported a legislative investigator’s conclusion that Palin had abused her power. When she was cleared by an Alaska Personnel Board report written by a self-described “loyal Democrat” investigator, the story was eight paragraphs long, under a one-column headline on an inside page.

· The Oct. 10 Metro section front featured a story and photo about Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) as a “giant-slayer” who had “won plaudits” for his work as head of the House Democrats’ national campaign committee. The story only briefly mentioned his Republican opponent, Steven J. Hudson. A campaign story on both ran inside the paper.

· A Post Magazine spread on Oct. 5 about Michelle Obama, with a cover picture of the Obamas, was timed to the release of a book by Magazine writer Liza Mundy. There was no cover for John and Cindy McCain.

· Robin Givhan‘s Oct. 23 column exploring the disconnect between Palin’s fancy duds and her hockey mom image ran on the Style section front just above an upbeat story about Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President-elect Joseph Biden. Conservatives thought that the placement’s message was “Bad Palin, Good Biden.”

Now Time’s Mark Halperin has chimed in.  At the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election, he unleashed on the media’s election coverage.

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

Halpering cited two NY Times articles as examples of this slant.

“The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies,” Halperin said. “The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn’t talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that’s ever been written about her.”

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was “like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is,” according to Halperin.

Of course, why these folks had to wait until after the election to let the public know, Douchebag Report doesn’t know.