The 2008 Fall Campaign

[Mister Tee]

Make a distinction between the PEJ -- which is a reputable organization; Tom Rosenstiel has long years of credibility in the industry -- and this article, which leans GOP (actually less so than many AP articles of recent vintage). Oddly missing from the story? Prominent Democratic voices, to counter the Va. rep and Rush Limbaugh.

It's quite hilarious, of course, for Pubs to be complaining about Obama's trip, given that McCain's campaign had been goading him into making it for quite some time -- even putting up a countdown clock on their web-site illustrating how long it had been since Obama was overseas. This falls into the "be careful what you wish for" category.

[OscarGuy]

Anyone heard of this org? sounds to me like they're ignoring more fundamental issues of how coverage is made...and by asking Rush Limbaugh ONLY for his comment, this smacks of partisan journalism.

Is media playing fair in campaign coverage? By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer
Mon Jul 21, 8:46 AM ET



NEW YORK - Television news' royalty will fly in to meet Barack Obama during this week's overseas trip: CBS chief anchor Katie Couric in Jordan on Tuesday, ABC's Charles Gibson in Israel on Wednesday and NBC's Brian Williams in Germany on Thursday.

The anchor blessing defines the trip as a Major Event and — much like a "Saturday Night Live" skit in February that depicted a press corps fawning over Obama — raises anew the issue of fairness in campaign coverage.

The news media have devoted significantly more attention to the Democrat since Hillary Rodham Clinton suspended her campaign and left a two-person contest for the presidency between Obama and Republican John McCain, according to research conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

News executives say there are reasons for the disparity, such as the continuing story about whether Clinton's and Obama's supporters can reconcile. They even partly blame McCain. By criticizing Obama for a lack of foreign policy experience, McCain raised the stakes for Obama's trip, "especially if he winds up going into two war zones," said Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News.

Obama has traveled to Afghanistan and is expected to go to Iraq. He is also scheduled to visit Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and England. Network anchors stayed home during McCain's recent foreign excursions.

"The question really needs to be posed: Is this type of coverage fair?" said Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. "This is nothing but a political stunt."

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh said none of this should be a surprise.

"My prediction is that the coverage of Obama on this trip will be oriented toward countering the notion he has no idea what he is talking about on foreign policy and defense issues and instead will prop him up as a qualified statesman," Limbaugh told The Associated Press. "McCain, on the other hand, is a known quantity on these issues and his position does not excite nor fit the mainstream media's narrative on Iraq and Afghanistan, so they simply ignore it and him."

Along with newsworthiness, the question of fairness was discussed within ABC News before it was agreed Gibson would travel, said Jon Banner, executive producer of "World News." Also, if one network anchor decides to hit the road for a big event, chances are the others will follow.

"We have already been in discussions with the McCain campaign to try to afford them the same or a similar opportunity," Banner said. "We have gone to great lengths to be fair and provide equal time to both campaigns."

Shortly after Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, Gibson flew to Miami for a McCain interview, he said.

For each of the weeks between June 9 and July 13, Obama had a much more significant media presence. The Project for Excellence in Journalism evaluates more than 300 political stories each week in newspapers, magazines and television to measure whether each candidate is talked about in more than 25 percent of the stories.

Every week, Obama played an important role in more than two-thirds of the stories. For July 7-13, for example, Obama was a significant presence in 77 percent of the stories, while McCain was in 48 percent, the PEJ said.

Sure, there are some weeks Obama's going to make more news, said Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director.

But every week?

"No matter how understandable it is given the newness of the candidate and the historical nature of Obama's candidacy, in the end it's probably not fair to McCain," he said.

The Democrat has proven an attractive commodity; TV debates involving Democrats this campaign consistently drew more viewers than the Republicans. A Time magazine cover with Obama in 2006 was the second-best-selling of the year, and a Men's Vogue cover outsold every issue but the debut, according to circulation figures reported by Portfolio.com. Newsweek has done six covers with Obama over the past year, two with McCain. A Rolling Stone cover with Obama stopped just short of adding a halo.

If the attention gap continues, the campaign will essentially become a referendum on Obama, Rosenstiel said. While that may serve McCain's purpose — it beats a referendum on President Bush — it could leave the nation electing a president while the media are paying attention to someone else. Past press infatuations, like Howard Dean in 2004 and McCain in 2000, didn't turn into long-term affairs.

TV executives noted that Obama has courted attention, particularly for the overseas trip, more so than McCain. There's some danger involved, too. One Obama gaffe while overseas, or the appearance that he's not ready for an international spotlight, and the media's elite will be there to judge him, said Bob Zelnick, Boston University journalism professor.

Friedman cautioned against reading too much into things like PEJ's coverage index, noting that it's a long campaign. Yet it's an open question about whether Obama is simply a more interesting candidate at this point, partly because McCain has been on the scene longer.

While fairness is the goal, "what are we supposed to do, go gin up some story about McCain to get some rough equality of airtime?" he said. "I don't think so."

NBC News President Steve Capus said he finds it funny this is an issue, considering how much people have accused the press corps — and still do — of being too cozy with McCain. The Arizona senator had been a frequent guest of "Meet the Press."

"We're just trying to do our jobs," Capus said. "There's no question that there's great news value in Sen. Obama's trip overseas. That's why we are doing this."

[danfrank]

As someone who was employed as a telephone pollster when I was a teen, I feel compassion for pollsters and will cooperate with them if it's convenient. I like having my opinion counted, since I so often find myself in the minority. Beware the insidious push polls, though, which are disguised as opinion polls but through the wording of the questions are clearly trying to influence the caller. I had one recently from the gay haters who are trying to overturn same-sex marriage here in California. I gave them a strong piece of my mind, though I doubt it was worth wasting my breath.

[Big Magilla]

I would add, though, that it's not just cell phone users who will hang up - I have been screening my land phone calls for the last 5 1/2 years - I have caller i.d. and don't pick up a phone unless I know who the caller is. In the rare event that I do pick up the phone and it's a telemarketer or pollster I hang up. I don't even bother to say "I'm sorry" anymore. Most of them see any response as an opening for them to go into their pitch anyway.



Edited By Big Magilla on 1216330081

[Big Magilla]

Yep, it's a legal issue. As the Salon article states:

By law, cellphone users cannot be called by an automatic dialing system (to prevent obnoxious telemarketing), and cellphone numbers are not part of the normal random-digit-dialing residential-exchange universe. Survey companies prefer to conduct polls using automatic dialing, but to find cellphone-only voters, they must employ the less-efficient hand-dialing method. Cellphone users must be sampled separately and at greater cost in time and money. This means that polls utilizing the cheaper and more efficient means of making survey calls do not include cellphone interviews.

And as survey respondents, these voters are less cooperative anyway. Even if they are contacted, they are less likely to take a call, or to arrange a call-back, than land-line households -- further increasing the cost of reaching them.



Edited By Big Magilla on 1216329811

[danfrank]

Here is an article in Salon about the cell phone/polling issue.

[taki15]

I must confess Mister Tee, here in Greece we constantly complain about the idiocy of our media. But after watching closely how yours are covering the election, I have a newfound respect for our brand of journalism.

What I found really asinine in Novak's column is his analysis for states like Montana, North Dakota and Virginia: ''Yes, Obama is close or even ahead. But when the voters learn that he is (gasp!) a liberal then his numbers will collapse''.
Apparently until now the voters in these states have confused him with Huckabee.

My favorite reaction for today's fundraising was from Geraghty of NRO. He says that Obama's haul is a failure, because some of his supporters (who?) predicted he would raise 100 millions.

[OscarGuy]

Firstly, there is nothing preventing pollsters from dialing cell numbers except: The law. Yeah. Cell phone customers still have a privacy capability land line customers don't. That's why only land lines were opened up to the Do Not Call list. Telemarketers were not permitted to call cell phones, and I believe pollsters are classified telemarketers even though they sell no service. So, until the moratorium on telemarketing is lifted or a law is created to permit pollsters to call cell phone users, you will probably not get demographics from that.

Now, I know some of you will immediately discount this, but whether you want to admit it or not, Missouri is one of the foremost presidential bellwethers in electoral college history. Not since Adlai Stevenson has it not gone to the eventual presidential winner and that's the only time since the 1900s for it to have done so. Missouri currently leans to McCain but without a prominent senatorial race or a wedge ballot issue, there is nothing to drive voter turn out but the presidential election.

Now, it's FAR too early to lock any state to a candidate (except those nutty Rocky Mountain states and much of the Northeast and west coasts), so anyone saying there's a significant chance for either candidate to prevail needs to take a step back and wait for the post-convention bubbles to fade and for us to see how the election looks in the fall.

[Big Magilla]

I'm not sure technology doesn't exist to automatically dial cell phones - the problem may be more of a legal one in that some cell phone plans charge for incoming calls and any company that calls a cell phone without permission leaves themselves wide open for a class action suit.

The point, however, is well taken. They are indeed missing lots of folks who have only cell phones.

I'm not sure it's a bad thing that the media continues to claim this is a close race. A presumed close race will get out voters who might be inclined to stay home if they think their candidate will win anyway.

[danfrank]

A huge and growing problem with the polls is that the pollsters contact potential voters only on land-line numbers. Apparently there is no technology to use automatic dialers with cell phones. Younger folks in particular are trending toward having only cell phones, and of course this demographic strongly favors Obama. Some analysts suggest that Obama is actually leading McCain by double digits. The mainstream media won't talk about this, of course, because they make bigger bucks if it is a tight race.

[Mister Tee]

Taki, that analysis you cite has Ohio "Leaning McCain". Right: a state that barely went Bush in '04, when his approval was over 20 points higher, still leans GOP because...well, just because it has to.

Yglesias, Atrios and others all made the point you cite yesterday, and, right on cue, the TV pundits chimed in: Obama's lead can't count because it's not extraordinarily huge. (You can almost hear them saying, 8-year-old-ish, "He should be ahead by eleventy-hundred points") Several things: 1) When he does show up 9-12 points ahead, that poll is instantly discounted as "an outlier". 2) Reagan in 1980 TRAILED some polls at this point, and only pulled out to as much as a 5-point lead a few days before the election. 3) The smallish leads Obama consistently shows -- 4 to 6 points -- are enough to ensure a convincing Electoral College win. (As is demonstrated by the state polls being released, which show Obama comfortably ahead in all Kerry states, and also leading in 5-10 others...more than enough to win)

Then, today, the same spin is being pulled on Obama's fund-raising totals. The Wall Street Journal had been hinting ominously he was going to have a weak, maybe $30 million month, and would regret pulling out of public financing. Instead, he's reported a $52 million month -- his second best ever. What is the press reporting? If you add McCain's $22 million June to the RNC's total, and exclude alll Senate and Congressional Campaign committe totals, the GOP is just about even. Move those goal posts!

All this is why I recommend the Keys to the Presidency system for keeping one's sanity. The blather you hear every day on TV (soon to reach crescendos of idiocy over the barely-impactful vice presidential pick) is easier to dismiss when you know how elections actually work. There are debatably close electoral environments, where something minor can have a serious effect (see: Katharine Harris, Florida). But this is not one of them. This is one of the worst election environments any incumbent party has faced in the past century. Only a few elections -- 1920, 1932, 1952 and 1980 -- are truly comparable. And all of those resulted in sweeping defeats for the incumbent party, even (as in '52 and '80) where polls didn't indicate such. That's the reality of the year, whatever Chris Matthews or worse try to tell you.

[taki15]

That's perhaps the most delusional analysis of the upcoming election: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=27569

My favorite quote:

While state-by-state polls show a large Obama advantage, most of them overstate Obama's chances and understate the vote McCain is likely to get.

Why? Apparently because the all-mighty pundit thinks so. :p


And another apropriate assesment of the curent situation by Matt Yglesias:

Can I just note that I seem to live in some kind of mirror universe where the fact that Barack Obama has, for months, maintained a modest lead over John McCain in every public poll constitutes bad news for Obama and that the specific reason it constitutes bad news for Obama is that the larger political climate is favorable to Obama.

[Greg]

Well, Obama is "moving to the center" by voting for the FISA bill. Let's hope this doesn't start too much of a trend. If not, there is still reason to have hope for Obama. If he doesn't have stong convictions of his own, we can always hope public opinion will move in the correct direction.



Edited By Greg on 1214955393

[flipp525]

I totally forgot to mention this, y'all, but Obama worked out at my gym the other day! What led him to enter a primarily gay gym, who knows, but everyone was definitely all abuzz. He was doing chest and triceps from the looks of it. It was rather exciting.



Edited By flipp525 on 1214945659

[OscarGuy]

My mother brought up the Wesley Clark thing and you know what I said to her:

If anyone has the right to criticize and discuss someone else's military record, it's a fucking General!