An Obama Tilt

An article titled "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage" in tomorrow's Washington Post by their ombudsmen Deborah Howell reveals the following:

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

In her surveys Howell examined the Post's coverage for the time periods since last November and since Obama locked up the nomination last June.  She compared the frequency of "horse-race stories" versus stories that actually examined the issues.  She compared the number of op-ed articles praising or criticizing one candidate or the other.  She also looked at the total number of articles about each candidate and the number of times they appeared in photos.

A study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (link) concluded:

The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.

Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable-and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one-the most unfavorable of all four candidates-according to the study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

There are a few things that are interesting to me about these studies.  When I think about this discussion that compares unequal number of stories about the candidates (i.e., comparisons of how newsworthy they were) and that compares the unequal amount of negative coverage, if I interpret the inequalities as bias I am assuming that the unbiased state was equal coverage (i.e., both candidates were equally newsworthy and of equal interest to readers and that the two campaigns deserved equal amounts of negative attention).  Of course, this assumption that equal coverage is the unbiased state is not necessarily true.  As the Pew study acknowledged:

Since the end of August, the two rivals have been in a virtual dead heat in the amount of attention paid, and when vice presidential candidates are added to the mix the Republican ticket has the edge. This is a striking contrast to the pre-convention period, when Obama enjoyed nearly 50% more coverage.

Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments.

Maybe McCain received more negative coverage because he deserved more negative coverage.  Even if I agree that the media coverage focused disproportionately on Obama, it's quite ironic that the McCain campaign itself did the same thing in its ads…focusing more on reasons why Obama was a bad candidate than why McCain was a good one.  This was illustrated by the word clouds from the two campaign web sites back in August (link):

Update: Just to be clear, I think there was an Obama tilt among the media. I think there was also a tilt in reader interest in Obama (both negative and positive) which is a partial justification for imbalance. On the whole, as professionals, the media probably should have maintained more balance in amount of coverage and positive/negative scrutiny. I just don't think that the proper balance was necessarily equal coverage.