The McCain Bounce #1: The Media

The Media

The media is bias. This shouldn't surprise anybody, everyone is bias and susceptible to group-think. Media members likely don't realize that they're set off to the left or the right because they're always surrounded by like-minded people. Stay with me people, this is not going where you think it is.

What is:

According to a Pew research center poll taken this year some 60% of the national media members identify themselves as Democrats, 30% are independent and 10% are Republicans. They donate money to candidates in favor of Democrats at a rate of $4 to $1. Every honest (RE: Pew, or University of Chicago etc. NOT media matters or moveon.org) statistacal attempt to quantify the effect of the Democrat parties dominance of media jobs, be it word based analysis, commentator analysis and editorial analysis has concluded that the product they put on TV benefits specific candidates usually on the left.

Even Hillary Clinton's campaign fell victim to this phenomena and loudly complained of bias. The chair of her campaign went so far as to say that Fox News was the least biased outlet (a conclusion endorsed by the pew media research center).

So, let's recognize that most media prefers Barack Obama to John McCain. This doesn't make them bad, or dishonest or unprofessional. I suspect that most media members don't even realize that they're slanting their coverage because nobody around them has the perspective to even notice the bias.

Argue with this if you'd like but the mountain of numerical evidence along with my own, admittedly anecdotal, observation has convinced me that reporters cannot stop themselves from expressing their preferences in their reports. Given that and the fact that reporters are mostly members of the philosophical leftist wing of the Democrat party we have the result of a left-leaning news.

What happened:

So how does this effect the election?

Conventional wisdom would be that it would help Barack Obama. After all, if those who are in control of the media prefer a candidate they will knowingly, or I suspect unknowingly, use their position to promote his campaign - they can't help themselves. However, this is not what the polling data seems to indicate. While ratings for every media outlet went up as the campaign intensified McCain gained in the polls. This would seem to indicate that the more the American public is exposed to the left-leaning media the more they prefer John McCain.

Why it happened:

This gets complicated so bear with me.

Because there is a strong sense of fair play in the electorate and the media is largely known to be biased. So the public hears what the media says and assumes that there's more to the story. The news media has become the wikipedia of political information. A fine starting point, but so vulnerable to manipulation and bias that it's not trustworthy.

So if people are assuming the media leans left and then fact check with the campaigns themselves why is McCain benefiting more than Obama, especially in a Democrat year? This is the tough question because one would assume that people check with both campaigns to see for themselves after learning the basic outline from the news. But, I suspect that this doesn't happen. Because the media favors Obama I believe people are using it as a surrogate for the Obama campaign. They don't need to check with Barack... because the news is going to tell them what he thinks anyway. To support this idea I would direct you to the fact that McCain's website receives more hits than Obama's and McCain's campaign has more youtube.com video hits. It tends to imply that more people are checking him out though secondary media, and directly from his campaign, than Obama.

Conclusions:

This hurts Obama because the media is running a crappy campaign on his behalf. The media doesn't do a good job because it's frankly not nearly as biased as Obama's campaign or McCain's campaign. So comparing apples to apples what the McCain campaign tells you to promote himself and what the media tells you to promote Obama leads to the conclusion that McCain is preferable. It is this false comparison that is hurting Obama. He's lost control of his own message. Obama doesn't control the media, but because people assume that the news channels are 'in the tank' for him they're taking what they hear on the news as his campaign's position and looking to McCain for contrast. The fight between a media that can't help itself from being biased and a campaign that is openly biased isn't fair, so it's no surprise that McCain wins it.

The easiest example of this phenomena is how Sarah Palin has effected the race. Stay tuned for more tomorrow (or if I'm feeling up to it, tonight).