It’s as muddy as you wanna make it. Show me someone who is genuinely interested in collecting and tabulating the amount and nature of the coverage each candidate is getting to determine whether there is any bias. Then I might be persuaded. Show me someone who explains “here’s how I did it.”

Instead, what we have is info from folks eager to refute the notion that one candidate is getting most of the coverage and that this candidate is vastly preferred by the media.

Tully thinks I’m a starry-eyed uncritical adorer of Obama. [Admit it Tully, you do! :-) ] Yet I’m having little trouble noticing that Obama is getting a LOT of coverage, and that a lot of it is fairly uncritical. MAYBE the random samples I get from channel surfing are not wholly representative because of whatever I choose to watch. That’s possible. But there is just NO WAY that Obama is getting treated more harshly, unless one is only counting FOX.

Frankly, such a contention strains my credulity to the breaking point. For someone who purports to be moderate and reasonable Justin, you need to do a better job than to simply leap to report uncritically on such a study simply because it’s good for your team. This study is not worthy of trumpeting or calling folks attention to, it’s worthy of dismissal. Or perhaps derision. If one can’t report one’s methodology on something so utterly subjective, that’s a HUGE red flag. Hopefully sooner or later you’ll get this.

EX: A thirty-second series of 3 or 4-second man-in-the-street sound bites taken outside of a Klan meeting used by NBC to show racism affecting the election might be counted as 7-8 negative media mentions of Obama. Hey, they were aired on NBC, they were all distinctly negative about Obama! But such a story would itself NOT be negative, but fairly blatant supportive pro-Obama propaganda.

Point being, YOU DON’T KNOW. You’re taking Rainey’s characterization and interpretation purely on faith–yet Rainey has been a fairly consistent Obama booster, or at least consistently anti-everyone BUT Obama, one of those who can himself be tarred with the “biased media for Obama” label. He has a vested interest in repudiating that perception, and so can hardly be considered an impartial source.

Indeed, just on general principle when considering claims of media bias one can go directly to things such as the Tyndall Report, where the measurement is pretty straight-up. 5 to 2. Or to that 20-to-1 Obama/McCain journalist’s donation ratio, which is likewise an objective measure requiring no subjective interpretation at all. They are what they are. No parsing of mening, no subjective assessment, just a clear objective measure. How many minutes? How much money? How many donors? No shading required.

When you see something wildly at variance with the objective measures, you need to take a VERY close look at that source material. CMPA has not publicly released it that I can find.

And yes, I’m taking Rainey’s explanation as the truth. If the opposite proves to be true, then I’ll adjust the post accordingly and question his integrity from that point forward. But Tully…did he simply make up those percentages?

For example, Consider a study that awarded the same score to the following negative statements:

-Questions have been raised about Candidate A’s understanding of economic issues.

-Candidate B has a close long-term relationship with the Grand whatever of the Ku Klux Klan.

It gets awfully subjective awfully fast. Like Tully says, 5 to 2 is 5 to 2. That can be counted, quantified, and relied on in some substantive form. One thing you strongly predict from that 5 to 2 ratio is that among those who don’t pay very close attention to politics, they are much more likely to know who the dem nom is than the GOP nom.

Tracking the political donations of the media shows that the Obama/McCain “donation ratio” in the primaries was roughly 20-to-1.

Better go check the past releases from the same source before making that claim, rather than depending on cherry-picking out-of-context editorialism from the L.A. Times. Feliz is on the right beam–unless the coverage is immensely negative (not slightly negative, but “Obama eats babies and tortures kittens” negative) then it’s ALL good. Just spell my name right. The key line from the story is simple:

Obama got 166 minutes of coverage in the seven weeks after the end of the primary season, compared with 67 minutes for McCain.

Five to two is five to two. The media is giving Obama more than twice as much “free advertising” than they are giving McCain.

The only exception is Dole vs. Clinton’s second term, and 2nd Term Bush v. Kerry.

If the trend holds, it’s President Hope-Change-Believe come next JAN.

Spell my name right, is that it? No such thing as bad publicity?