A Biased Media?

I must say that I personally believed that the media was not unusually biased in their coverage of the election. While each media source may have some sort of bias, I did not personally believe that the "Obama-mania" really had any truth. However today's Washington Post had an enlightening article that seems to support Daniel's understanding of Leighly (A narrative bias) in the Washington Posts Election Coverage:

"Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

The Washington Post clearly articulates that they were creating a narrative of the election, not necessarily a comprehensive coverage of the nitty-gritty of the election. There are various other facts throughout this article to support the clear bias of the Post, most of which are difficult to really refute.

The local Jewish Paper of Los Angeles, The Jewish Journal, has had some really comprehensive and balanced coverage of the election, and this week there was an article featured that took a position that Mccain deserved to lose but Obama did not deserve to win. One of the supports for this argument was that

"The blatantly biased media did not explain the origins of the economic crisis; instead, the media consistently boosted Obama, who never actually had taken on his party, as the candidate somehow for change, while resisting any serious investigative reporting of Obama's myriad deficiencies and inconsistencies."

This argument fits with the seemingly obvious attempt of the media to creative a narrative of the election. If the media had actually made a serious attempt at covering the issues in the election it would ruin the "story" of Obama. Where I think some of these arguments may fall weak is in the result of the media's narrative about Obama. It was inspirational to Americans at a time when they were looking for inspiration, and the media would be lacking if it did not cover Obama's candidacy in the storyline of the civil rights movement of the last hundred years. While this may have created a bias in media coverage, it might have been the only way to truly grasp how this election fit into the narrative of American History. This video below from will.i.am really gives meaning to what it means in America for an African-American to be elected president.