Every time a Democrat wins the presidential race, the deniers of liberal media bias insist that the Democrat drew better media coverage only because he was the superior candidate. But Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, really exaggerated the difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. To him, one was a classic for the ages, and the other was a laughable piece of effluvia: "Citizen Kane no doubt got much more positive coverage than Beverly Hills Chihuahua." He proclaimed McCain "more than earned his negative coverage" since he "half-heartedly clung to the outdated Karl Rove playbook."
There's no doubt Obama got plenty of positive publicity -- much of it for good reason.
Did the media get carried away at times by the paroxysms of excitement over Obama's candidacy, the staggering crowds, the enthusiasm of his supporters, the stunning Internet fundraising? Of course, and it wasn't just high-decibel MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews and his tingling leg. If there wasn't some of Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance," there certainly was plenty of exuberant exuberance.
But much of that was because the media were covering an extraordinary political phenomenon.
Not that Obama got a pass. It's hard to remember, but for months no one gave him a shot; the media consensus was that Hillary was a slam dunk for the nomination. At one point during the primary season, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright got so much time on cable you'd have thought he was a missing blonde in Aruba. When Clinton was cleaning Obama's clock in the second half of the primary season, much was written about Obama's inability to "close the deal" and his difficulty winning votes in blue-collar America.
Rieder seems to confuse the question of media bias with the broader field of political punditry. The chattering classes did suspect Hillary Clinton was inevitable in 2007, and they did seem to fret about his inability to win the blue-collar vote. But Rieder makes no real attempt to assess media fairness more than an inch below the surface. The media overhyped Reverend Wright? Your rebuttal is here.
Then Rieder gets truly ridiculous when he claims Sarah Palin received "swooning" coverage from the national media. What channel was he watching? Who in the MSM claimed the Palin pick was genius?
And after the Republican National Convention, at the height of Sarahmania -- speaking of the swooning media -- the narrative was that the selection of Sarah Palin was a stroke of genius and that Obama had lost the Big Mo.
Until the election and beyond, the nonbelievers kept complaining that they didn't "know" Barack Obama and muttered darkly about Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko. Yet Clark Hoyt, public editor at the New York Times -- and you can't get much more MSM than that -- wrote on October 4 that the paper had done 20 "tough" pieces on Obama compared with 13 on McCain.
The paper laid out the Ayers saga on page one. Beyond the GOP base, nobody cared.
A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the media cast McCain in a much more negative light than it did Obama. But that hardly means the press was unfair to the Arizonan. Covering the candidates equally would be a false equivalence if one campaign were performing far better than the other one.
"Citizen Kane" no doubt got much more positive coverage than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua." My beloved Phillies got plenty of good ink when they won the World Series this year. All the years they failed to qualify for the playoffs, not so much.
