Sunday, August 10, 2008

"Liberal" Media Update


I'm blogging this so it doesn't go down the memory hole when Democrats do a postmortem and ask why Obama lost to the train wreck that is McCain.

The Washington Post, a newspaper labeled "liberal" by the right, headlines an article "Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds" even though the article itself contains, in a single paragraph, the fact that McCain would balloon the deficit even more. The headline doesn't mention McCain, the two plans aren't compared, and the entire article, except for that one paragraph and its minor detail (that McCain is worse on this question) is devoted to criticizing Obama.

Bradams at Daily Kos explains it all here. In short:
...we have Obama'a plan that according to the article would add $3.4 trillion and we have McCain's plan that would add $5 trillion. Yet the article contains a single sentence about McCain's tax plan and instead goes out of its way to imply that Obama is misleading voters.
The way the headline is written also has an obvious anti-Obama, pro-McCain bias. Even though the headline doesn't mention McCain, saying one candidate's tax plan is bad news for the deficit implies that the other candidate's tax plan is not. And that is the only message that casual readers, who don't read the entire article carefully, will walk away with.

I can understand progressives' frustrations with Obama. What I can't understand, and what someone can explain to me is why the so-called liberal media doesn't want Obama to win this election. I mean, I have ideas about that, but a lot of my white friends get angry when I bring them up.

2 comments:

Frank Partisan said...

wait unril editorials of endorsement are printed. I'm sure they'll be pro-Obama.

Matt J Stannard said...

Yes, just as most mainstream editorial endorsements were pro-Kerry in 2004. Look how much difference that made.