I don't know whether they are still running it, GZ.
However, I think we can count on it that they will do a hit piece on Bush this Sunday (maybe three!)
For a laugher look at this. The Boston Globe says it's shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that the media is covering Kerry far more favorably than Bush. Liberal hypocrites!
Kerry winning the battle over coverage, study says
By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff | October 27, 2004
A new study of campaign reporting concludes that Senator John F. Kerry, buoyed by his performances in the presidential debates, was covered by the media far more favorably than President Bush in recent weeks.
The survey released yesterday by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 59 percent of the stories that were primarily about Bush from Oct. 1-14 were negative in tone, compared to only 25 percent of the stories about Kerry. And while 34 percent of the Kerry coverage was favorable, a mere 14 percent of the president's coverage put him in a positive light. The survey examined 817 stories from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Miami Herald; the evening and morning news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC; PBS's nightly newscast, CNN's ''NewsNight With Aaron Brown;" and the Fox News Channel's ''Special Report With Brit Hume."
''The press always likes the race to tighten, and the debates offered that moment," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, explaining the contrast between journalists' treatment of Bush and Kerry. ''In a year that is confusing and when the polls are flopping around, the debates offer a moment of liberation for the reporters, because they can resort back to the safety of being drama critics."
In anointing Kerry the winner of the debates, journalists took cues from the snap polls used to gauge public reaction to those events. The CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that viewers declared Kerry the winner of the first debate by a ratio of 53 to 37 percent. The public saw the second debate as a largely even contest. But in the final debate, Gallup respondents, by a ratio of 52 to 39 percent, thought Kerry was the victor.
Forty percent of the stories examined in this survey were about the debates themselves, but Rosenstiel said the perceptions created by the debates spilled over into coverage of other campaign issues. Chuck Todd, editor in chief of The Hotline, an online digest of political news, said the debates merited the intense press attention they received.
According to a similar study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2000, Bush enjoyed more favorable media coverage in the final stages of that campaign than Al Gore. Even so, Kerry fared considerably better in the waning weeks of this campaign than Bush did four years ago. And in an election season already marked by charges of press partisanship, the survey results are likely to fuel complaints about liberal bias.
''I have no doubt that people who perceive the press as liberal are going to see evidence of this in those numbers," said Rosenstiel. ''My own view is that the inside-baseball, drama-critic mentality is at play here, and it's the same mentality that helped Bush four years ago."
Todd said that some of Kerry's friendlier coverage can be attributed to the campaign's decision to recruit former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry, who is viewed as an effective spinmaster when it comes to conveying a campaign message. ''I think McCurry deserves a lot more credit than this whole idea of liberal bias," he said.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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