Saturday, November 08, 2008

Now She Tells Us   [Byron York]

From the Washington Post ombudsman, Deborah Howell, in an article headlined "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage":

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

Howell concludes that the Post did too little biographical coverage of Obama, and its paucity of stories on Joe Biden constituted a "gaping hole" in the paper's campaign coverage.  "It was a serious omission," Howell says.  As for the general pro-Obama bias, what accounted for that?

Post reporters, photographers and editors — like most of the national news media — found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

That probably explains why the Post offered such generally positive coverage of the newcomer Sarah Palin.

11/08 07:33 AMShare