Post Admits to Obama Bias, World Says ‘No Doy’

From the FRC comes this startling completely expected report that there’s bias as the Washington Post. To be fair, I should say it’s surprising to hear them admit it.

Now that the election is over, the Washington Post would like to get something off its chest. In an article today that read more like a confession, Post ombudsman Deborah Howell confirmed what most Americans already took for granted-the paper’s 12 months of campaign bias. Her piece, “An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage,” put the editorial board on the hot seat through head-to-head comparisons of the amount of coverage and kind of coverage each presidential candidate received. “…[R]eaders have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama,” Howell writes. “My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.” Conceding that the paper was “deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs,” she admits, “Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago, his relationship[s]… The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.” She goes on to list the following:

• The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13.
• There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32.
• Stories about Obama in the news pages, 946, outnumbered those devoted to McCain, 786.
• Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain 144 times.
• Only 13% of the stories from June 9 to November 2 were about issues, and 66% of the remaining articles were about Obama compared to 53% on McCain.
• “Some readers thought the Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right.”

It’s rare for the mainstream media to own up to its shortcomings, but my question is not whether there was prejudice, but what the Post plans to do about it. The damage to this election cycle has already been done. Can we count on the paper to objectify its coverage in the days and months to come? On bias, it’s like the Post marketers say, “If you don’t get it, then you don’t get it.”