McCain-Obama: Equal treatment?
We get occasional complaints -- normally when we mention Sen. Obama on the front page -- that we give him preferential treatment.
Today, your paper, once again, put Sen. Obama on the front page under "Quick Read" with a headline story on p.3, again with picture and plenty of coverage, while relegating Sen. McCain to "Washington Brief", two paragraph story farther down the page. In sales, we call this Position-Position-Position. Just another of your many ways to try to show Sen. Obama in the best of circumstances while trying to downplay his opponent. If you can't see this for yourself, you need to have your eyes checked.
That was yesterday. Obama was on the front page because his proposal to expand efforts to send money to religious groups is a decent news story. It breaks with his more liberal positions for one thing, and it expands upon a program that began in a Republican White House. On the other hand, Sen. McCain's visit to Colombia was much less newsworthy. He essentially asked the country to do a better job with human rights. Worthy but hardly surprising.
Still, we're going to track our presidential coverage to see who gets what sort of coverage day in and day out. The one caveat: When it comes to politics, we try to be fair, but we can't always give equal coverage. Sometimes candidates make news by what they say and do. And attempting to be equal cannot trump news judgment.
Comments (1)
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I hope you're not trying to imply that the media,
in general, doesn't give more coverage to Obama than to what's his name...Oh yeah...John McCain. I can't help but wonder the news coverage if it had been Obama in Columbia right before the hostages were released. Since you're the editor, you can go back and see how many stories the N&R has printed on the two candidates. Also which pages those stories ran on. N&R is a more liberal publication. I don't know why you want to deny that. This is one reason the word liberal has such a bad ring to it. It's like an alcoholic that doesn't want to admit he has a drinking problem. Go ahead and give more exposure to Barack Obama. You have that right. I have the right to not buy the N&R. Which I haven't done in over a year. I actually drive into Kernersville on Sunday morning to get the Winston-Salem Journal. This is how much I dislike the N&R. Again...Go ahead and deny it, and keep the paper how you want it. I, like others, will just continue to not buy the paper.
Posted on July 4, 2008 5:13 AM