November 8th 2008
WaPo Fesses Up: Bias, Bias, Bias
T
he Washington Post’s Ombudsman, Deborah Howell, will wait until tomorrow’s issue - five days after the election - to deal critically with the Post’s efforts to throw the election to Obama. Here’s what she found in her analysis of WaPo’s coverage:
- OpEd pages: 32 favorable pieces on Obama vs 13 favorable McCain pieces, and 58 negative op/eds on McCain vs just 32 on Obama
- More Obama photos (311) than McCain photos (282), with Obama leading McCain in large pictures ,small pictures and color (can I say that) pictures
- More Obama news stories (946) than McCain news stories (786), which she explains in part by the longer Dem primaries, but admits that after the conventions, Obama got 626 stories and McCain got 584
Howell doesn’t analyze the stories’ content, which is unfortunate, but she admits that they were biased towards Obama:
But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.
Howell apparently doesn’t think the entire “spread the wealth” meme and various radical associations are worth even bringing up.
What’s WaPo going to do with this information? Nothing, as far as I can tell. Here’s what WaPo political editor Bill Hamilton had to say to Howell about the coverage, and it doesn’t sound like a man who’s the least bit worried about his role in further damaging the credibility of our free press:
“There are a lot of things I wish we’d been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don’t at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion.”
Yeah, but gee Bill, don’t you think the campaign would have been even more interesting if you and your peers had actually, you know, covered it?
Posted in 2008, Media bias | 1 Comment » | 
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Comments
November 10th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
At least the Washington Post can admit their bias. I am still awaiting for the stats on the WSJ, which was clearly biased against Obama. Considering that the Journal is more than 3 times larger in circulation than the Post, they ought to come clean on their opposite bias. It might show that overall the newspapers balanced each other out…