Just more working the refs. Howell's no more a reader's advocate than is Broder.

Hard to believe that there is anything worth less than the WaPo. But Deborah Howell each week manages to show she is totally worthless. And they still wonder why their circulation is down. Morons.

wonder if she would like to 'analyze' the ap coverage ? starting with liz 'sprinkled donuts' sidoti ?

Yup, working the refs. No matter the differences in the campaigns, no matter the truth or lies relative to one another, every word and sentiment has to be entirely 'balanced' by the other.

Want something else infuriating? Read Time Mag's cover story -- Obama "must" appoint real Republicans to real cabinet positions, and must piss off each party equally.

Fuck.

I suspect one of the reasons so much time has been devoted to "bitter" and Jeramiah Wright was that the media felt obliged to find a balance of criticism. It's also why we read so little about McCain's lobbyist brigade, health, military history, Keating 5, temper tantrums, and relations to the Republic of Georgia. Whenever the cabal news channels did fact checks they likewise went for balance rather than importance.

By Howell's standards, the Detroit Lions should be treated with some equivalency to the Tennessee Titans. It's not their fault the media is so negative.

That's nothing, take a look at the Post's sports page. By the end of the baseball season, the Post had reported only 82 wins for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Meanwhile, the Post reported 97 wins for the Cubs, who play in Obama's home state of Illinois. This uneven, unfair, and unbalanced reporting was done depsite the fact that both teams participated in an identical number of games (162) over the course of the season.

These numbers aren't exactly overwhelming, but far-right blogs were thrilled by Howell's report, using it as "proof" of media bias.

To the contrary, the far-right blogs' delight with Howell's whinge is proof of their bias and delusion.

I'm going to enjoy watching these imbeciles when Obama shows them he doesn't get gamed that easily. Maybe Howell (and Time's editors) should have read Audacity of Hope and learned a bit about their subject.

My money says they will be jostling for a place in line to cover him, no matter what kind of spin they are trying to put on the "Media coverage" story. That angle is just so... Sarah Palin...

Here's the deal: If you were to compare the coverage of two NFL teams, and one of those teams was 12-4 and the other 4-12, then I am willing to bet that the coverage of the 12-4 team would be be more positive. In fact, it should be.

Not complicated.

Isn't this a validation of the right wing noise machine? They use the internet to plant fake stories, pick the stories up on talk shows, and "force" the fish wraps to publish them. It looks like Howell is just confirming how effective they were.

"Balance"--- a word used to ensure that a minority (the right-wing n' white-collar crooks) maintains its dominance over the majority (evil liberals n' mainstream suckers).

'the press is biased -- in favor of recognizing who is winning and stating that perhaps too often."'

It would be much fairer if they pointed out who was losing too often. How can they not point out who is ostensibly winning/losing? The real problem is that when one candidate says 2+2=5 or reverses positions according to the barometric pressure, they don't mention or downplay it. Gee, I wonder where the bias is there?

I imagine Genghis Khan has had more bad things written about him than Mother Theresa. McCain ran a vile, devisive campaign because he knew it was his only very slim chance at winning. This whole "balanced" fantasy of the media can get ridiculous. George Bush lied about WMDs and a half million people were killed. Obama might have lied about a library book in High School. They are not the same.

I went to www.journalism.org- that seems to have better analysis of the media attention. Thing is, when a candidate is running a negative campaign, why would a paper be positive on it?

I'm so glad to see that Howell's nonsense specifically (this isn't the first time, by the way), and the bogus idea of "fairness" generally, is coming under fire. Idiots like Howell would want fair treatment from the German press of the Nazis during the 30s: hey, there's two sides to the Holocaust story, right???? Of course in their attempt at "fairness," they become complicit in the wrong.

McCain's failings were huge, the racial posturings way too evident,
and they simply could not dress up the superficial pit bull, and well--Obama was inspirational!
Conservatives spoke for no one, too ill at ease with diversity.

I suppose if one of the major parties runs Jack the Ripper next election, the Post will do their best to see to it that he gets an equal share of positive stories too. Perhaps they will do a series on his proactive campaign against prostitution?

now look...everytime the wapo had to write a story about, sya, WHO WAS RUNNING THE BETTER CAMPAIGN...they were kinda stuck...so, surprise, more positive stories about obama than mccain...

kinda begs the question...what POSITIVE things WERE there to write about mcain????

"maverick" "p.o.w." "not bush" ..uh....uh...."p.o.w.," p.o.w.," p.o.w.," p.o.w.," p.o.w.," p.o.w.,"

I went to www.journalism.org - RememerNovember

Seems to me they used the same criteria as Howell. Sad. Of course Olbermann and Maddow is going to do more pro-Obama. Matthews a little less, but at some point he gave up on McCain. The rest of MSNBC is no different than CNN or Fox.

I suppose if one of the major parties runs Jack the Ripper next election, the Post will do their best to see to it that he gets an equal share of positive stories too.

That depends which one of the parties it is that runs Mr. Ripper.

A lot of this seems to me to be the false equivalency that still enslaves much of traditional media: that is, if I have a good story about candidate X then I need a good story about candidate Y to be "fair." It's quantity over the quality of truth and accuracy, a mindless equivalency that attracts lazy minds. What if Y slings lies, mud, grotesque innuendo? What if X runs a smart, issues-based respectable campaign? To be fair and balanced, should a paper suppress the story about the better campaign if there have been two stories about the bad campaign? This is idiotic and a disservice to readers/voters. What if there is nothing much good to say about Y, and even his partisans come (however slowly and regretfully) to that conclusion? Are you supposed to stop writing about the other candidate? Just drawing up a list of numbers is, usually, a cheesy shortcut on the way to a prefabricated conclusion.

Affirmative Action: isn't that imposed when there is an imbalance in opportunity between one "class" of people and another? Historically poorly educated and privileged persons are offered assistance to equalize the disparity in opportunity. At some point, they must meet the same standards as others, but for a brief time they are given an advantage to catch up. Is this what our Republican friends are asking for? Affirmative Action so they get the same coverage as their more privileged opponents? Seems right to me. 4-12 and 12-4 deserve the same coverage. That way the advertisers will pay equally for exposure in the Oakland press and the New York press.

peace,
st john

Media bias is such a crutch to conservatives. They are clearly hungry for any data that could possibly be used to support that idea. Howell's in-depth study should be expanded to other papers. How did Obama do on the op-ed and the front page of the Washington Times?

Why stop at newspapers? Those are so 'old media', like 19th century old media. Lets move into the 20th century and compare the media's coverage of the Obama and McCain campaigns on RADIO. How about it, Steve, are you up to the task? I'm willing to bet that despite NPR, numbers in the radio coverage would be heavily biased towards McCain, given that Hannity, Limbaugh, Hewitt, Ingram, and a host of other, shall we say, somewhat less rational conservatives (that is, compared to George Will) dominate the waves. Why not make a Kevin Drum style excel graph to plot out the radio programs?

howell on 11/2/2008:

Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage -- and that's as it should be. But it's true that The Post, as well as much of the national news media, has written more stories and more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain. Editors have their reasons for this, but conservatives are right that they often don't see their views reflected enough in the news pages.

right, it's unfair that their "views" aren't reflected in the news pages. funny, I thought the news pages were supposed to report facts not "views".

DP in Texas said 'Genghis Khan has had more bad things written about him than Mother Theresa'

Absolutely great book called 'Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World' will offer insight into the man's impact. He was a brute, in an imperial sense, but who wasn't in that era? He spread ideas, technology, and good plants from Vietnam to Poland to Iran as a matter of policy. His was kind of like the golden age of Islam. Submit, pay tribute, and enjoy the advantages, which were were substantial, of the empire, or else.

I have to ask: Do facts have a liberal bias, or is it that conservatives, because of the peculiarities of their world view, simply deny reality and thus end up lying to support their view?

It just seems that conservatives either ignore reality or just plain lie in order to buttress their positions. At least that's the way it seems from the media and conversations I try to have with conservatives.

Has it always been this way? I would love an example of a conservative laying out the case for conservativism that doesn't just resort to lies or gobblety-gook. Got any examples?

Nerd:

The conservatives await the rapture. Even Sarah Palin is still talking about God's will for her future in politics...someone smarter than me observed:...
They profess the kind of fundamentalist for whom all knowledge is revealed, not learned.
I've had discussions with people like that and it's pretty amazing. They
know no cognitive dissonance. They easily believe mutually contradictory
things at the same time with no discomfort. All important truth has been
revealed to them via their religion so they not only have no use for
science, they have no use for most of what the rest of us would call
reality. They think: Who cares whether Africa is a country or a continent?
To them, that's not germane to divine truth and any kind of curiosity for
its own sake just takes away from focusing on that truth.

Every bit of information that does make its way in from the world is
filtered through that revealed truth. If it can be used to reinforce those
revealed beliefs it is kept for that purpose and if it can't it is simply
ignored.

The narrower your world is, the easier it is to function without disturbing
that framework

WaPo is a pos and a horrible disservice to the District of Columbia. It's been a cesspool of idiocy and often indistinguishable from the Moonie Times ever since Katherine Graham died.

She concluded that the Post had an "Obama tilt" over the course of the year

Yes, but so did the American electorate...and, frankly, so did reality.

Question, I don't know...Is unregulated free enterprise essential to conservatism? At its base, IMHO, conservatism says don't come down from the trees, it's too dangerous. Have the ideas of caution and deliberation, certainly reasonable, been perverted into pathetic defensive reaction?

Those who have wrecked this country for almost 3 decades, should not be allowed to retreat to a supposed fortress that is nothing more than a reflex that is wrong as often as it is right and thwarts progress.

Apparently, the ombudsman wants "balance" -- in this case, relatively similar numbers -- regardless of merit

If we asked for this kind of treatment on Fox "News" I suspect they would call it "quotas".

If THIS were the fairness doctrine they fear so much, I'd be inclined to agree with them.

How about 'which candidate takes more days off' and therefore has, say, no Saturday events to report... That'd be 1/7th less appearances and statements to cover.

I dare say that none of those numbers seem to reach a 1/7th difference, which is odd, since McCain took two days off each week.

"Does anyone doubt that if McCain had roared to the lead in October and stayed ahead until the end that the results of the studies would have been completely different?"

I doubt that the studies would have been made...

Yes, but to be perfectly fair and unbiased, we should have had exactly as much coverage of people not attending McCain events, attending McCain events but walking out en masse after Sarah Palin spoke, not giving Mc Cain money and not coming out to vote for McCain as we did of Obama drawing up to 100,000 at rallies, raising record-shattering amounts of money from mostly small donors and mobilizing millions of campaign volunteers.

Sounds like Howell is simply applying No Child Left Behind standards to the Post--you know, like this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3595188

"They know no cognitive dissonance."

Well, you can't have cognitive dissonance without cognition.

I send Ms. Howell a short e-mail about her musings. Here it is:

"If McCain received more "negative" stories than Obama, it's because his campaign sucked more, on a quantum level. In other words, it's HIS fault. I don't see how a paper like the Post turns McCain's negatives into positives without doing a lot more manipulation of what's supposed to be hard news, and your headline writers and assignment editors do enough of that already.

"Face it, Ms. Howell! Sometimes candidates EARN 'negative' stories. Or, as Colbert puts it, "Sometimes the facts have a liberal bias." Your prescription seems to be, to alter the Post's reporting of the facts, to keep conservatives happy. Some ombudsman!

"And as far as your claim that the Post should have covered Tony Rezko more??? Pa-LEEZE. If there was any "there" there, the Drudge people woulda found it. To propose that the Post should join Drudge and Fox News in pounding on Rezko, JUST to make right-wingers feel better about the Post, is nuts.

"My suggestion is, go pull a bunch of Geneva Overholser's columns when she had your job, and spend a weekend reading them. She had a clear, crisp, articulate vision of the press's job, one that soared above momentary political wind gusts. She was a referee who really KNEW the rules and ideals of journalism, and believed in them down to her bones. Reading your columns, I'm not sure if you're the referee, or the shuttlecock."

Side note: Geneva Overholser knew what an ombudsman was supposed to do; Ms. Howell thinks it's a PR position. Why the Post would demean the position by giving it to Howell, I don't know...wait a minute...maybe I do.

I thought these guys were against affirmative action?

She concluded that the Post had an "Obama tilt" over the course of the year.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

And it's gotten even worse since the election! There were so many more Obama stories this week than whatsisname the loser stories ... IT'S JUST NOT FAIR!
</li'l debbie>

It's not about the Fairness Doctrine. That one only comes into play when the liberal bias is the truth.

How Republican.

Steve, Steve, Steve: quit being so naive! (Hey, that even rhymes!)

Don't you know that the NUMBER of comments about a candidate in print is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing? The content of the articles is irrelevant, according to the right wing for one simple reason. It is MUCH EASIER to count articles than to actually read and understand them. If you try to read everything instead of just counting, you could not possibly "read all of the newspapers" as at least one prominent candidate so proudly boasts!