Press Bias

Why McCain is getting hosed in the press

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

The Politico must really be feeling the heat. Thankfully, they seem to "get it" in the sense that they understand that a raw measure of negative to positive stories is not a valid measure of bias. If one campaign really is doing badly and another campaign really is doing well then it makes no sense not to report it that way. It just takes intestinal fortitude to stand up and defend it when the inevitable complaints come in.

Of course, I can remember liberals making similar complaints back in the day about the opposite bias, and I generally agreed with them. One thing this election has taught me is that bias is not as easy to detect as one might think. Maybe Gore and Kerry got more negative coverage because they simply ran inferior campaigns? I've known many Democrats who say that they did run bad campaigns (including myself), but would they admit that maybe the negative coverage of those campaigns was justified?

Again, its hard to say.