I was watching Morning Joe today on MSNBC and heard Joe Scarborough make a rather remarkable comment concerning the media coverage of the Obama campaign going back to 2007.
“All through this campaign, Barack Obama was the story the media wanted to tell. And if you ran against Obama, whether you were [Hillary] Clinton or John McCain, they were going to tear you to pieces.“
This was particularly noteworthy coming as it did on that particular network. One recent study in Variety revealed that MSNBC led the pack in apparent bias for election coverage, with 73% of their stories about McCain being rated as negative, compared to 57% negative stories on McCain in the other networks on average. Most of these networks also love to feature clips from the Daily Show and the late night programs such as Letterman and Leno. They do this in the spirit of “injecting some humor” into the campaign coverage, but the folks who did this study at the University of Delaware also noted that the jokes poking fun at McCain vastly outnumbered the digs taken at Obama.
So what do you think? I make a point of watching several sources each day: Morning Joe, Fox and Friends, and CNN Headline News. Except for Fox, I must admit that the coverage has really been telling the story as Scarborough described. Obama’s detractors have chaffed at the perceived lack of coverage on stories involving William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and other “questionable” associates of Barack Obama. Truth be told, I have seen these stories mentioned on MSNBC, but they are almost always couched in catch phrases, such as, “why anyone would care about this…” and it gets brushed aside. (Personally, I agree with them and don’t care much about those stories, but it is news, so you’d expect them to cover it in a more even handed fashion.)
And so I ask you, ladies and gentlemen. Did the media, in large part, decide that this was the story they wanted to tell back in 2007? Did they actively and knowing seek to “tear to pieces” Hillary Clinton and John McCain? Particularly for the Obama supporters here, please note that I’m not asking you to change sides, or say that Obama is horrible or any such thing. You are free to agree with the story being told and agree with the portrayal as you wish. But when you watch this endless coverage, I’m just wondering if you ever felt a small twinge of embarrassment or discomfort at the fawning going on over this candidate?
Was Barack Obama the story they wanted to tell? And did they wind up injecting themselves into the plot line to make sure the story stayed on script? Let us know what you think.