posted
That's true, Christine. I was just wondering. Two people were running for Vice President. I don't think there were equal numbers of stories about both. There was "news" every single day about each of them.
Dagonee, when television news divisions became a profit making entity instead of a public service this was the inevitable result. Their job became to get people to watch. They don't do actual investigative reporting. They mostly just report the talking points of whoever they are interviewing and repeat what everyone else is reporting.
I agree that the lack of depth in reporting is frustrating. You should have seen me during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. I don't agree that it shows a particularly liberal bias. And I don't believe that tallying the number of stories, positive or negative is a useful measure of the problem.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:And I don't believe that tallying the number of stories, positive or negative is a useful measure of the problem.
I think it's highly useful. For example, I've seen people deny that the media published more stories about Obama, or that they were more positive. It's useful to be able to prove that these denials are inaccurate.
It's also interesting that even when positive and negative are not factored in, Obama received significantly more coverage than the person he was running against. Even if it doesn't prove the case that the media has a liberal bias, it demonstrates that the media coverage favored Obama.
I go beyond that: two people from the main parties were running for president in a race closer than the poll's ability to measure until a month and a half ago, and the newspapers at issue published only 80% as many stories about one as about the other.
Each was campaigning every day. There was the same amount of "news" about each of them.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Dagonee: I agree that the media should probably have covered McCain more proportionally to Obama, but no, there was not the same amount of news about each of them. Obama's running was an event of interest to a broad segment of the population previously less interested in elections; news outlets probably concluded (quite logically, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did statistics) that their viewership went up more with stories about Obama than about McCain.
To news outlets, news isn't just 'stuff happening', it is 'stuff happening that more people want to hear'.
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If McCain was going to quietly small rallies in various small towns for a month straight, and Obama was doing crazy stunts every day for a month (examples: sacrificing small children, raising $1,000,000 in one day, flipping off reporters, and eating 12 scoops of ice cream in one sitting, etc), you think that the media should have a similar coverage on both the candidates?
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posted
At some point, interest and relevance for particular populations does matter for something to be news. Otherwise there'd be no differentiating the trillions upon trillions of things that happen every day.
That you consider the only important aspects of interest and relevance to be being a presidential candidate and campaigning as such does not mean a news organization might not have a different view, not just about what news they'll publish, but about what is news, and that such a view shouldn't at least be perused.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: I go beyond that: two people from the main parties were running for president in a race closer than the poll's ability to measure until a month and a half ago...
I addressed this already on page 1. Obama led consistently going into the Republican convention and regained his lead shortly thereafter. The polls were only neck-and-neck for a week or so. Pollster, 538, or whatever poll tracker you prefer should show the same trend. I know Pollster and 538 both do, since I checked them after Ron Lambert's post on page 1.
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Each was campaigning every day. There was the same amount of "news" about each of them. [/QB]
I'm not disputing your larger point, but presumably the McCain campaign's talking points re: Obama's "troubling associations" (Ayers, Khalidi) account for some of that gap, since news outlets then had to run stories about Obama's associations.
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posted
Dagonee, I don't know how you are defining news. As far as I can tell, the news programs are defining it as "what people want to watch". Or at least what the media people think that people want to watch.
Gov. Palin was far more "interesting" as a candidate than Sen. Biden was. Hence, we heard a lot more about her than we did about him. They were both running for office so there was the same amount of news about each of them. Her news was just more interesting and likely to get people to watch.
Honestly, if you want better news coverage, watch PBS or foreign, state subsidized news like the BBC. The press does a better job when their job isn't to make a profit.
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quote:That you consider the only important aspects of interest and relevance to be being a presidential candidate and campaigning as such does not mean a news organization might not have a different view, not just about what news they'll publish, but about what is news, and that such a view shouldn't at least be perused.
That's basically my point: the news organizations had a definition of "news" that ended up favoring Obama. I haven't said one thing about their intent. I've been talking about the effect.
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posted
It favored Sen. Obama because he did more things that were likely to be considered newsworthy. Again, reflecting what was there. If Sen. McCain had been the one being more newsworthy, he would have gotten more coverage.
*by newsworthy, I mean what the press thinks that people will watch.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: ... They were both running for office so there was the same amount of news about each of them.
On the other hand, was there really? Palin has the trooper scandal, the spending in Alaska, the spending on her campaign, the reading "everything" gaffe, the fruit fly and "real American" gaffes, and more. Does Biden really have anything comparable merely by campaigning a similar amount of time?
I think this is what Jhai was getting at. At some point you have judge whether Obama's rally with tens of thousands in Germany is really equally as newsworthy as McCain going out to eat pancakes, simply due to both taking approximately as much time.
quote: Honestly, if you want better news coverage, watch PBS or foreign, state subsidized news like the BBC. The press does a better job when their job isn't to make a profit.
I don't know if that would really equalize the volume of coverage which is one of Dagonee's complaints. Palin gives 96 hits in the last month at BBC using Google News compared to 42 hits for Biden. 381 for Obama, 246 for McCain.
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posted
Dag, there have been two points made in this thread that could explain the discrepancy, but which you have thus far ignored.
The first is twinky's quite reasonable suggestion that this may be in part the McCain campaign's own doing, by running a heavily negative campaign that was all about Obama's supposed connections to various unsavory people rather than the merits of John McCain and Sarah Palin themselves. I suspect that news articles debunking such flat-out false claims as Obama being close friends with William Ayers would count in the "positive for Obama" column, even though such an article never would have been written if Palin and McCain hadn't made such a big deal out of Ayers in the first place.
The other important point that you haven't addressed is the Palin/Biden discrepancy. I haven't seen any hard numbers, but I would be willing to bet serious money that Palin's coverage far exceeded Biden's - and we're talking a difference that far exceeds the difference in coverage between Obama and McCain. And the vast majority of Palin articles, at least during the month following her selection, were positive. Does this mean the press was biased in favor of Palin? No, it just means that she was considered more newsworthy than Biden. Which, frankly, was true.
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posted
Mucus, that was the point I was making. Dagonee wrote about the presidential candidates that "each was campaigning every day. There was the same amount of "news" about each of them." I was pointing out the problem of this by using the VP candidates. It isn't that the press was favoring the democrats; it is that the press favors the "interesting".
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posted
Duly noted. Consider my quote about you saying that there was the "same amount of 'news'" redirected to Dagonee's original writing.
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quote:Mucus, that was the point I was making. Dagonee wrote about the presidential candidates that "each was campaigning every day. There was the same amount of "news" about each of them." I was pointing out the problem of this by using the VP candidates. It isn't that the press was favoring the democrats; it is that the press favors the "interesting".
I don't care why they favored the democrats. They did. If it is because the democrats were more "interesting," it doesn't affect the nature of my comment one whit.
quote:I suspect that news articles debunking such flat-out false claims as Obama being close friends with William Ayers would count in the "positive for Obama" column, even though such an article never would have been written if Palin and McCain hadn't made such a big deal out of Ayers in the first place.
Such an article would most likely be counted as being both about McCain and Obama.
quote:The other important point that you haven't addressed is the Palin/Biden discrepancy.
There's nothing to address until someone posts numbers. Moreover, if your guess about the amount of coverage is true, it doesn't change the nature of my comment.
quote:Does this mean the press was biased in favor of Palin?
I'm not talking about bias. I'm talking about whether one candidate received more coverage over the other in the coverage. The answer is that Obama received more coverage.
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posted
Okay, then I'm not sure where you are going with your point. Do you think it was unfair? Do you think that we should do something about it?
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Yes. I think a crappy definition of "news" skewed the coverage of this election. I find that to be unfair.
quote:Do you think that we should do something about it?Do you think that we should do something about it?
Depends on who you mean by "we." I don't want the government to do a thing about it directly (although I'd like to see certain restrictions on free speech lifted, I don't think that was the issue here).
I would like people to stop denying it happened, for a start.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Yes. I think a crappy definition of "news" skewed the coverage of this election. I find that to be unfair.
quote:Do you think that we should do something about it?Do you think that we should do something about it?
Depends on who you mean by "we." I don't want the government to do a thing about it directly (although I'd like to see certain restrictions on free speech lifted, I don't think that was the issue here).
I would like people to stop denying it happened, for a start.
I don't think that anyone is denying that there were more stories and even more positive stories about Sen. Obama. I think that we differ on why. My theory is that there was more interesting news - and more positive news - to report about Sen. Obama.
I don't see how that is unfair if it is true. If Sen. McCain wanted more positive stories reported about him he should have done more interesting and positive things.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Dag -- I think I see your point now. Because of the historical nature of this campaign, the regular old white guys running were overlooked in favor of a black man and a white woman.
The only thing is that through Palin, I think the Republicans did end up getting as much coverage as the Democrats.
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posted
Dag, I still haven't had an answer to my hypothetical scenario. If one person is doing run-of-the-mill campaigning, and one person is doing out-of-the-ordinary campaigning, do you think they should get the same media coverage? Do you think it's unfair if they don't? Or what if one candidate isn't doing anything but sitting at home eating twinkies - should the media have as many headlines about twinkie eating as they do about the candidate who is out doing things?
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I did a search on the NBC news site for Palin and got 17 pages of links to stories and 4 pages for Biden.
ABC had 401 pages for Palin and 492 video results. 369 pages for Biden and 309 video.
CBS News 823 pages for Biden. 1,270 for Palin.
My guess is that Gov. Palin was just more interesting.
Again, what do you think should be done about this? News agencies that are supposed to be making a profit by attracting viewers are going to report stories that they think people will want to see.
quote:Dag, I still haven't had an answer to my hypothetical scenario.
That's true.
*shrug* If you want to be an ass about it, you're welcome to it. I just won't bother trying to discuss anything with you in the future.
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posted
*shrug* I'm not sure why you felt the need to point out that I hadn't responded to you. Now you feel the name to call me an ass. Interesting tactic to then deprive me of such "discussion."
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
You responded by claiming that people should stop denying that Sen. Obama got more coverage. Okay. I wasn't denying it before, but now I assert that, indeed, Sen. Obama got more coverage.
I don't see how that helps. Or how the situation is unfair. Or if it is unfair, how it can be remedied. It doesn't have to be a government remedy. What do you want the news agencies to do? Or the audience?
You also have at least some evidence that Gov. Palin got more coverage than Sen. Biden. Do you think that this was also unfair?
Also, you said that the coverage for this election was skewed. I imagine that is the case for elections in general.
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quote:You also have at least some evidence that Gov. Palin got more coverage than Sen. Biden. Do you think that this was also unfair?
Given what I've posted, I would think the answer to this would be pretty obvious (assuming the accuracy of your numbers solely for the purpose of answering this question) - no, it wasn't fair.
As to remedies, I've said all I have to say about them.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
This is John Mccain's THIRD time to run for President and Charisma is not his strength.
This was Barack Obama's FIRST time to run for President, the First time a Black Man held a major parties nomination and Barack Obama's cup runneth over with Charisma.
Does the Media lean left? Yes. Especially after the Republicans painted them as the enemy for 8 years.
Posts: 262 | Registered: Oct 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Each was campaigning every day. There was the same amount of "news" about each of them.
Says you. Just because they were both running, did not mean that there was as much noteworthy news to cover from each of them. You can make other claims, but the fact that they were both running is not good enough.
As for positive v. negative, it's not the media's job to create an election that appears to be even. Ironically though, they kind of try to claim it is anyway, even when it isn't, and even as they do (and I agree with you here) exert an influence on it one way or the other, depending on which news source we're talking about. I think you quite completely skipped over boots' most important point, which is that these are money making enterprises, and as such have abandoned much of the sense of responsibility they may have had, (at least as entities in themselves) to report the news according to reality. Reality may still get reported, but you won't know the difference anyway in today's climate.
At the same time, there's an argument to be made in the idea that the public sense of "fairness" or "balance" has actually just started making the media look more slanted, even though it really always has been. I think it's perfectly possible that the very notion of "fair and balanced" to borrow the fox expression as the most accessible, has actually made most of the media less balanced, because it presents a false sense of even handedness when dealing with issues and personalities that do not deserve a level playing field, and thus are misrepresented in that balance.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Do you honestly believe Dag that the Republicans would have won if the News media were somehow more "balanced"?
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If Obama was covered more by the press because he did more, had more public attention, and did more interesting things, dagonee, you're contending that if the press is biased in favor of covering more interesting election news, it's essentially unfair.
I dunno, man. If one of the candidates in an election sits in his hometown for the entire campaign, I'm not going to say that it's unfair when his opponent gets more press by traveling the country and setting up huge events.
quote:Each was campaigning every day. There was the same amount of "news" about each of them.
Let's say on a hypothetical day,
- Obama draws massive crowds in Berlin in a record-breaking event. - McCain gets stuck away from his planned event because of weather.
There's equal amount of campaigning there, but there sure ain't the same amount of news. There's imbalances of news on a day-to-day basis and it's kind of a big jump to assume that it's necessarily going to equalize so that there's equivalent 'news' about both candidates.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I'm less interested in how many web results come in a google search than I would be by the amount of traffic that each of them gets. Are the Obama stories being read more often than the McCain stories? If so, why would you put out more news that no one is reading? The news business is a business and is subject to demand like any other business. If people want more Obama coverage, as possibly evidenced by web traffic, providing it is smart business sense.
But whether one of them got more coverage or not is kind of useless as far as I'm concerned. Quality matters in an election more than quantity. Was the coverage good or bad? And that's without even looking at whether or not it's justified or not.
Personally I think the media strives too hard at times to present the candidates and issues as equal when they really aren't at all. I've heard the joke in a lot of places, most recently when Campbell Brown said it on the Daily Show, but if one candidate says it's raining and the other says it's sunny, the news will report them both as equal, rather than looking outside and seeing for themselves. And for that matter, has anyone seen an actual breakdown of time spent on CNN or another network either talking about or showing campaign coverage of both of them? Most of the data I see comes down to the web, but what about coverage of campaign stops, speeches and the like? To me that looked to be fairly equal. They covered a hell of a lot more than I thought was really newsworthy from BOTH campaigns.
When you get into quality discussions and questions of fairness, Samp's example is especially fantastic. Repbulicans complained all throughout this race that Democrats were unfairly favored and given positive coverage. On the day when Obama was giving his big speech in Berlin before a throng of adoring Germans, McCain was covered too, only he was knocking over cans of fruit juice in a supermarket. Frankly I think NOT covering McCain that day would have been a lot more helpful than covering, and as a result Republicans called that "negative" coverage.
They BOTH got too much coverage in my opinion. We just had a 12 month election where 24 hour news channels and websites spent every waking minute covering SOMETHING having to do with the election. Can anyone honestly say that because of a lack of coverage they missed some vital detail on one of the candidates?
If you're drowning people with information, does it really matter if the tank used to do it was bigger for one candidate than the other? The effect is still the same.
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posted
When Obama was in Berlin, I remember the coverage of McCain being him in a supermarket knocking over cans.
If the headline had read "Obama speaks to massive crowd of Berliners while McCain calls for cleanup on aisle 5," it wouldn't have been untrue.
That might have been as a result of the weather, I don't remember, but that wasn't really a hypothetical so much as it was a real life example of one such day of coverage, albeit a rather extreme example.
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First, the study which found more coverage of Obama than McCain is being interpreted as though it applied to all the media. It did not. This was a self study of the Washington Post. It only looked at articles published in the Washington Post. It is premature to conclude that this trend applied to anything but the Washington Post, a newspaper that ultimately endorsed Obama.
This sheds a very different light on the question of fairness. If it is fair for a newspaper to endorse a candidate -- why is it unfair for that paper to give broader and more favorable coverage of that candidate?
I would be very interested in results from a broader study. Did papers like USA today or magazines like TIME have a similar disproportionate number of articles on Obama. If this was a general trend across all newpapers, then perhaps we can talk about fairness. As it is what we have is one paper that endorsed Obama favoring him in their coverage.
The second logical error is the classic presumption that correlation implies cause. It is at a minimum implied that Obama won more votes because the media wrote more about him. I read an interesting analysis of this a couple days back. I'll have to see if I can find the link to the study. What it found was that in general, favorable media coverage for both candidates followed the polls, it did not precede them. This pattern began in the primaries and persisted through out the campaign season. For example, following Obama's victory in Iowa there was an increase in the number of positive coverage. The same happened during the primaries as McCain won early victories. Following the GOP convention when McCain jumped in the polls, there was an increase in positive coverage. Note that the jump in positive coverage always followed the jump in the polls so it could not have been the cause.
One telling part of this Washington Post self study was the discussion of what happened on the Op-ed page. The writer reports that although the times has several conservative columnists, "not all of them were gung-ho about McCain".
I think that pretty well sums up what happened in the campaign. Obama aroused an enormous amount of enthusiasm from his supporters where as conservatives weren't particularly gung-ho about McCain. In fact it seemed that a fair fraction of the republican party were set to sit out the election until he nominated Palin as his VP.
Obama inspired people, he provoked enthusiasm and excitement and that drew media attention. People are wrongly concluding that that excitement was caused by the media attention when in fact I think the opposite can be shown to be true. Media attention followed the grass roots excitement about Obama.
Obama got people excited in a way that Americans haven't been excited about an election in my adult life. Even when Reagan won land slide victories in 1980 and 1984, no one was dancing in the streets. That spirit drew media attention and I have a hard time finding that unfair.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:First, the study which found more coverage of Obama than McCain is being interpreted as though it applied to all the media. It did not. This was a self study of the Washington Post. It only looked at articles published in the Washington Post. It is premature to conclude that this trend applied to anything but the Washington Post, a newspaper that ultimately endorsed Obama.
Incorrect. The percentage figures I quote come from here, "which examined 2,412 campaign stories from 48 news outlets, during six critical weeks of the general election phase from the end of the conventions through the final presidential debate."
quote:The second logical error is the classic presumption that correlation implies cause. It is at a minimum implied that Obama won more votes because the media wrote more about him.
I specifically have not said anything about cause.
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posted
Bad times are a good time for rethinking one's approach to things, like how you approach discussions.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I wasn't posting here at all when I was going through the worst times of my adult life. I didn't come back here until the social anxiety brought on by a low-fat fruitarian diet had subsided considerably. I was afraid to interact with other humans much at all. It was a weird, weird time in my life.
And, on a another note, do you really think Dag's approach to discussions is the best? I'm just asking.
As for me, it's hard to teach me much if you have your own obvious biases that I can see and point to. I generally won't listen to a conservative/extreme anything, Christian, Jew, atheist, or otherwise. Not that I can't learn a thing or dozen about interacting, but Dag is going through a divorce. For that matter, I think almost anybody who has gone through a divorce either needs to re-examine their spouse-picking software, or their personal-interacting software, at least.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by steven: For that matter, I think almost anybody who has gone through a divorce either needs to re-examine their spouse-picking software, or their personal-interacting software, at least.
posted
This is a direct quote from Threads, before he edited. "That's just... plain ****ing inappropriate."
Rivka's posts to me are nearly always directly insulting and often uncalled for. I don't see you ever defending me, and, for that matter, I myself have been divorced.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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