The joke that is political news

Ok, so I said a while back that the whole "liberal media" thing was getting old. Although one of the issues was brought a little balance, you saw very little looping of the audio or Youtube videos of Hagee on evening newscasts. This is what motivates me to derisively refer to the term, and supports my contention that the media is hardly interested in "helping" Obama. As of now, it's just a joke to pretend that he is a "media darling" as some claim. (report)

In effectively clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama survived late firestorms of news coverage about his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which was by far the dominant media story of the entire campaign, according to an independent research organization.

The story of Wright and his race-based rants against United States policies surfaced in March and received four times more coverage than any other theme or event throughout the campaign, according to data compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center in Washington. The issue undercut Obama with working-class white voters in the later primaries, most analysts have said.

Over the last five months of the campaign through June 1, Obama received significantly more news coverage than the other candidates. He was a major figure in 63.5 percent of campaign stories, compared with 54 percent for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who started the contest last year as the odds-on favorite. Both Democrats received more than double the coverage accorded presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, who was a prime subject in 26 percent of stories, the survey also found.

No other story line came close to attracting as much coverage as the Wright-Obama association, and most of it was negative. The nonpartisan project monitored and coded about 300 to 400 campaign stories per week in nearly 50 news media outlets, including newspapers, broadcast and cable television, radio, and Internet news sites, tracking campaign stories in which the candidates received at least 25 percent of the print space or broadcast time.

Yeah...real "liberal media" for you. Excellence in journalism. It's time for "silly season" in campaign coverage to be over; we need journalism that does justice to the gravity of the issues that our country and our world are facing. See the whole report for more.

*Oh, and not that this joke qualifies as a journalist, but he does reveal the paucity of tools in the GOP toolbox: Red Scare is still one of the few.*

On a more positive note, let's hope Obama shows 'em all and gets 40% of the Evangelical vote, as per RR flack Mark DeMoss.

*Check out the remix of 2Pac and Nas about Obama*