I think some of the stories were reactive, but I don't think it explains the complete imbalance.

I agree that there was a more cooperative role between Obama's campaign and the media, but I tend to assume this is because of media behavior and you assume it's because of campaign behavior. Without knowing what efforts the McCain campaign made, it's hard to really know.

EATA: I'm editing this again. If you look at page two of the report, it breaks down all the stories by type so you can see that while the coverage of polls was positive for Obama, so was almost everything else. And maybe offering support from your point about the failures of the McCain campaign, the only stories that were overwhelmingly negative for Obama were reports on McCain's attacks on Obama. But go to page three of the report and see that McCain got some of his worst negative coverage when he started to attack Obama.

I don't know a whole lot of people who have worked on either campaign, or who have worked in high enough positions to know, but my experience with other campaigns (from the national to state levels) is that it works this way because of campaign behavior. It depends a lot on the work of the policy and communications people, and how they shape the relationships.

I'll check out the other parts of the report when I have a chance, but just wanted to make that point.

Again - let's say there are 9 things that McCain did that were "negative" or had negative connotation for his campaign, and 1 thing that Obama did . . . would you thus be upset with a 3:1 ratio of good:bad stories?

You're simply not allowing for context here - it seems pretty clear that things like Palin's gaffes (real or perceived) were more pressing than anything the Obama/Biden camp did, and much more timely. Ayers got a lot of press time, but it happened years ago - it wasn't an ongoing story.

I guess I just don't see how you've proven any imbalance that can't be explained away by mitigating factors.

And I can't see how you aren't defining mitigating factors as anything that might justify the imbalance.

Think about the nutty stuff Biden said. How was it less pressing than what Palin said?

It's less "pressing" because of the nature of Palin's public vetting - I don't see why you're up in arms that "new News" takes precedent over "old News" during any given cycle. Additionally, the handling of Palin really made context control difficult - all you had were two interviews that went mediocre-to-poor, then a press corps scrambling to find any story to put up and fill the audience's hunger. That is a fault on the part of the McCain camp, and it appears to have had significant influence on which stories were reported (and even how). To separate effect from cause seems spurious at best.

We can do this for every point, if you'd like, but it won't change the fact that you're interpreting what is essentially a market-based field (news reporting, based on ad revenue and viewer demand) as something that has an implicit bias toward Obama. I mean, go ahead with that, but I don't think it's nearly that cut-and-dried, and this may very well violate Occam's Razor.

I think individual members of the media allowed their own preferences in candidates to overtake doing a thorough and impartial job reporting on the candidates.

I don't think this interpretation violates Occam's Razor.

Also, Palin was a virtual unknown, and we all wanted to get as much information about her as possible. Joe Biden, we knew stuff about. We all knew he was kinda batshit. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, was a total mystery!

When I went on my vacation to Puerto Rico the Thursday before Labor Day, McCain hadn't picked a running mate. I didn't follow the news because I was on the beach drinking mojitos the whole weekend. So, when I got back to the mainland, not only had McCain selected a running mate, she was a virtual unknown with a LOT of crazy stuff going on. So, even though I ended up not liking her, I was very hungry for information about her from the beginning. I bet this happened to some extent with the media.

Exactly - when you combine the fact that Palin was a newcomer on the national political scene, with the mismanagement by the McCain/Palin communications people, it just added up to trouble. Biden has 20-something years of reports of how he is a hothead. When you introduce someone to the national electorate at such a high level, the scrutiny is going to be higher.

This, except I was at work for the whole weekend, not on a beach.

The new is always fascinating, and the Palin coverage was new. I just think that the news producers were sitting there going, we could cover this minor slip up that McCain made, or this one from Biden/Obama, or we could cover the NEW vice presidential nominee's potentially scandalous history. What do you think they would go for? The media craves any scandal.

Who? How? You really think that the multiple layers of editorial control let this become a widespread phenomenon?

You really think that there's one segment of the American workforce (main-stream media) that is just magically overrun by Democrats, and ones without any apparent sense of journalistic ethics at that?

That's kind of where I'm going with the Occam's Razor issue - since the nation as a whole (and particularly the college-educated portion, of which journalists would be drawn) leaned Obama, you should expect journalists to as well, but I just don't see it as endemic beyond that simple fact. Certainly nothing to be aghast at, or that can't be seen as having massive contribution from an awkward McCain campaign.

I believe that members of the traditional media skew Democratic, yes, and I believe it happens at a different rate than simply the overall vote this year would reflect. I think that some occupations attract a higher percentage of people with a similar basic mindset. ( ETA: I'm not implying some sort of hive mind or anything for journalists, just that the traits that attract people to the field may also be more likely to make Democratic politics more attractive.) For a counter example, I think that Baptist preachers probably skew Republican.

I believe that people allowed themselves to believe that the coverage they were providing was appropriate based on the relative merits, as they saw them, of the two candidates, and I think this bias ended up being pervasive.

What I kind of expect to see is that the next time a Republican wins the presidency, if Pew publishes a similar report, we'll see that success on the campaign trail and novelty in the news cycle really doesn't explain the difference in the tone in coverage.