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Originally Posted by KSigkid
But the research summary by Pew seems to say that the stories were reactive, and it doesn't make any conclusions as to whether those stories affected the voters. Additionally, it seems pretty broad in what it cites as "negative" and "positive" stories. From my reading, a story that Obama was doing well in the polls would be classified as "positive," while a story saying that McCain's numbers were falling would be "negative."
Also, I'm not saying that the media was "controlled" by a campaign, so to speak. But, the campaigns have a lot of power to shape the story, to shape the coverage. Again, I've seen both sides of it, albeit from a much more limited scale (in both reporting and media relations). But, the opportunity is there for a campaign to shape the news cycle to a certain extent, and Obama and his people did a better job of seizing that opportunity.
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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.
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