The Media Is Beating Up Obama, Cake-Walking McCain: Where's the Liberal Bias?

Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo at 3:17 PM on July 29, 2008.

We all know it's bullshit, but like so many other zombie narratives, here's an old perennial stomping its way through the graveyard ready to snatch the souls out of anybody who has the temerity to suggest it isn't actually ... alive:

Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.

Such pronouncements, sorry to say, tend to be wrong since they describe a monolithic media that no longer exists. Information today cascades from countless outlets and channels, from the Huffington Post to Politico.com to CBS News and beyond.

But now there's additional evidence that casts doubt on the bias claims aimed -- with particular venom -- at three broadcast networks.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

[...]

The media center's most recent batch of data covers nightly newscasts beginning June 8, the day after Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic nomination, ushering in the start of the general-election campaign. The data ran through Monday, as Obama began his overseas trip.

Most on-air statements during that time could not be classified as positive or negative, Lichter said. The study found, on average, less than two opinion statements per night on the candidates on all three networks combined -- not exactly embracing or pummeling Obama or McCain. But when a point of view did emerge, it tended to tilt against Obama.

That was a reversal of the trend during the primaries, when the same researchers found that 64% of statements about Obama -- new to the political spotlight -- were positive, but just 43% of statements about McCain were positive.

They don't bother to discuss the other Democrats' coverage in this piece, but suffice to say that a large part of the coverage of Hillary Clinton was negative during that period. So, let's not pretend that there was any systemic "liberal bias" during the primaries either. When you combine the negatives of Obama and Clinton compared to McCain, his coverage was a cakewalk.

It might be tempting to discount the latest findings by Lichter's researchers. But this guy is anything but a liberal toady.

In 2006, conservative cable showmen Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly had Lichter, a onetime Fox News contributor, on their programs. They heralded his findings in the congressional midterm election: that the networks were giving far more positive coverage to the Democrats.

More proof of the liberal domination of the media, Beck and O'Reilly declared.

Now the same researchers have found something less palatable to those conspiracy theorists.

But don't expect cable talking heads to end their trashing of the networks.

Repeated assertions that the networks are in the tank for Democrats represent not only an article of faith on Fox, but a crucial piece of branding. On Thursday night, O'Reilly and his trusty lieutenant Bernard Goldberg worked themselves into righteous indignation -- again -- about the liberal bias they knew was lurking.

Goldberg seemed gleeful beyond measure in saying that "they're fiddling while their ratings are burning."

O'Reilly assured viewers that "the folks" -- whom he claims to treasure far more than effete network executives do -- "understand what's happening."

Again, those of us who read blogs and watch the media through a critical lens know that this is just the stupidest meme on earth. After watching them have a mass four year orgasm over George W. Bush standing on a pile of rubble with a bullhorn saying "Ah hear you. And the people who did this are gonna hear from us real soon! yuk, yuk" like he was reciting Shakespeare's Henry V St Crispin's day speech, it's a little bit hard for me to take seriously the idea that they have anything but a bias toward cheap, shallow ignorance (which naturally favors movement conservatism.)

The danger in this is that this narrative is an easy off the shelf taunt that results in the media immediately overcompensating, particularly since many of them were, early on, admittedly smitten with Obama. I knew that the end result of that would be the resurgence of the old standby "liberal media" critique and it would end up being a problem for Obama (or any Democrat who was the recipient of their attentions.) This is the phenomenon that the right tweaks and manipulates whenever there is the slightest tilt to a Democrat.

It's completely absurd, of course, because the press has been giving John McCain a perpetual "happy ending" for years now. Even after he has completely proven himself to be a pandering, corrupt sell-out to everything he ever said he believed in, they excuse him by saying it's ok because he doesn't really mean it. (That's my all-time favorite: any other politician is excoriated for being "inauthentic" if he changes his mind about what to order in a diner. But McCain openly selling his soul to get elected is seen as evidence of his integrity. You've gotta love that.)

The problem with our media isn't that they like or dislike a politician that we also like or don't like. It's that they treat politics like a celebrity game show and it makes it very difficult for the people to even know what their interests are, much less who best represents them. It doesn't help us if they are temporarily enamored of one of our candidates -- they are like children, easily manipulated for the right's purposes and after decades of pounding home the myth of the "liberal media" all it takes is the tiniest bit of open affection toward a Democrat to get the wingnut noise machine cranked up and ready to go.

It's theoretically possible that we could change this around, over time, and create a "conservative media" theme. But really, the best thing to do would be to try to get the press to cover politics better. They don't have to treat it like a horse race or a talent show -- they could stop blackberrying each other all day to swap tired conventional wisdom and checking in with Drudge every half hour to get the latest dirt and just do reporting. There are plenty of journalists who manage to do it. They just don't cover politics.

Tagged as: clinton, bill o'reilly, obama, fox news, mccain, cbs, nbc, abc, liberal media, news coverage

Digby is the proprietor of Hullabaloo.