Are you ashamed of the biased presidential coverage?

Rolling Stone's election coverage is the most biased of anything out there. Obama gets three covers in about four months. McCain gets one where he's drawn to look like a buffoon.

Taibbi is the most biased writer out there. I wouldn't have a problem with this if he were a columnist, but never once has there been an opinion tag or anything. He is a great writer, but everything he does is "The Death of a Red State" or "Why McCain would be worse than Bush"

One of their main political writers is Robert Kennedy Jr. I'm sure he has no biases at all.

 

I wish the biggest problem were Rolling Stone. I feel like that's kind of like the Daily Show - you know who runs it and what you're going to get, and it's a shame that many form their opinions from it, but I don't expect more. The bigger problems are the ones that present themselves as hard news, like Newsweek etc.

 

Bias is often in the eye of the beholder.
What I think some confuse with bias is lazy, pack journalism.
Or they see someone paid to offer an opinion, and when one is offered that they don't agree, they call it bias.
That has happened plenty of times this political season with AP's campaign coverage.
Lots of liberals jumped to the conclusion (soon to be a board game) that AP's Ron Fournier was in the tank for McCain because Fournier had once been offered a job by the McCain campaign. When examples were cited, they were most usually analysis pieces and not straight news reporting.
If they were critical of Obama, then it was because AP was in on it for McCain. If the articles criticized McCain, the conservatives chanted "liberal media, liberal media."
This being from the board's libs and conservatives.
If we are trained professional, who do this for living, how can you expect the public to note the difference?
Because that the text is in ragged left, or it has a drop cap or the tag is CMYK 0%, 81%, 73%, 22%?
That makes it an opinion piece.

 

All other things being equal, Newsweek's going to be clearly left of Time. As it's been, so shall it be.

But week in, week out, the only wholly-offensive, one-way lefty
feature in Newsweek is the Conventional Wisdom checklist, which is clearly authored by someone well-conversant with a list of
DNC talking-points, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

That said . . . we could go on with abundant, outrageous examples of wholesale lies/distortion from the righty press . . . and will, as appropriate.

 

Rolling Stone has a chart in the latest issue of "10 who must go" referring to senators and congressmen who they want out of office.

Any guess how many of the 10 are republicans?

Yup... All 10.

 

You know what you're going to get with Jann.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

 

Clearly there is biased reporting for both parties. It just seems like the bias towards Obama is a tad greater.

 

It's unfortunate because the magazine sometimes does some amazing stories that are legitimate and not dripping in bias. Wenner and Taibbi and Kennedy have done a lot to destroy that.

 

Which, nine pages into this thread, not a single example has been cited.

Not a single one.

OK, righties, here's a media-bias test we can all do that should be simple:

Four years ago, a Republican president won re-election with the smallest popular-vote victory margin for an incumbent in the history of the republic, and his party made minimal gains in Congress.

On Tuesday, a Democratic candidate will likely earn a definitive popular-vote win and Electoral College landslide, and his party Congressional margins much bigger than the opposition enjoyed from 1994-2006 -- including, possibly, a filibuster-proof Senate.

In the days after the election, if everything goes down as expected, make careful notes of how often the terms "mandate" and "political capital" are tossed around in mainstream media. In 2004, you heard them so much, you'd have thought that the American people had bestowed the power of a king on the election winner.

It will be interesting to see how much those terms are used in the analysis next week.

I'm taking the under, based on this pre-election example of terminology:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/

This is the oh-so-liberal Washington Post's electoral map. Obama currently leads 207-158.

Iowa, where Obama leads by 11.4, has a status of "battleground state."
Pennsylvania, where Obama leads by 9.5, has a status of "battleground state."
Minnesota, where Obama leads by 12.1, has a status of "battleground state."

These "battleground states" are not part of Obama's current EV vote total from the WP.

Georgia, where McCain leads by 4.2, has a status of "leaning Republican."
North Dakota, where McCain leads by 4.0, has a status of "leaning Republican."
Montana, where McCain leads by 3.4, has a status of "leaning Republican."

These states are part of McCain's current EV vote total from the WP.

I must have missed that day in math class where they taught that 3.4 is greater than 12.1.

 

I wouldn't think that drug use by someone in his youth would be especially horrifying to Rolling Stone readers, and thus not worth a huge investigation. They mentioned it -- didn't ignore it -- but in the context of that audience, not a big deal unless he'd been dealing or wound up in jail or rehab.

 

I guess every word in every publication is in play, but I don't know that I think Rolling Stone is a great focal point of this discussion, no matter how you feel about the whole thing.

Rolling Stone leans left? Really?

 

Uhhh . .. yep.