Just how difficult was it to persuade the media to follow their anointed one? Andrew Malcom writes in the LA Times campaign blog:
All of this [Obama coverage] prompted Investors Business Daily to publish a trenchant op-ed by William Tate that reported on his examination of Federal Election Commission records for donations by journalists.
You’ll never guess what he says he found — 235 journalists donating to Democrats while only 20 gave to Republicans for a total of $225,563 to Democrats and $16,298 to the the GOP-inclined.
That’s small potatoes moneywise in terms of the nearly $1 billion collected so far in this election cycle. But Tate sees a valuable built-in bias among Democratic journalists for candidates of their party.
Last summer Bill Dedman at MSNBC did a massive research project, examining political donations by journalists over several years and found a similar overwhelming number of Democratic journalists (125 of 143 political donors while only 16 gave to Republican candidates and two others were bi-.
Shocking huh? As a denizen of many newsrooms in my time, I can agree with this. I would be shocked to find out if anyone else in my newsrooms were conservative/libertarian. We became sort of a secret club. Usually, it was the sports guys and a few meteorologists.
I still find it funny that some people actually see a pro-McCain media bias. At least the Project for Excellence in Journalism is rational. They have found that in two-thirds of the election stories, Obama has been the more prominent story. But the PEJ is quite mealy-mouthed in revealing its findings:
“No matter how understandable it is given the newness of the candidate and the historical nature of Obama’s candidacy, in the end it’s probably not fair to McCain,” [project director Tom Rosenstiel] said.
Really? That’s the best you can come up with?
One wonders what the outrage would be had it been Fox News covering McCain’s campaign with half the fawning rhetoric that the rest of the mainstream media does.
I do wonder if people will tire of all of this sweetness and light and hope and change coming out of the Obama camp and its adoring media. On one hand, I chuckle at this column from the Times’ (London) Gerard Baker, telling the Obama story like it’s a Psalm:
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.
When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”
But on the other hand, it seems to me that there are just too many people who are tired of Bush, and will vote for someone, anyone who brings the message of change, even if they know deep down it’s nothing but empty rhetoric. I certainly can sympathize with this, but if you really start looking at it, the true candidate of unity really is McCain.
That’s not an endorsement of McCain, it’s just simple — McCain has shown he’ll compromise with democrats; Obama has been a rubber stamp for the democrats.
Still, it’s encouraging that McCain is still close in the national polls. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens post-convention and during the debates. And despite what the media wants you to think and believe, Obama isn’t inevetable. After all, these are the same people crowning Hillary as the next president years ago.
