A Followup on Media Coverage of the Campaign

In an earlier post, I used data from the Pew Research Center to show that Fox News was surprisingly "Fair and Balanced" in their coverage of McCain and Obama, and MSNBC wasn't. Here is a followup with the numbers from some of the other media outlets. Note that in some cases the numbers come from me squinting at the charts, so they may be slightly off. What I call "Pro and Anti", Pew called favorable and negative. Pew's "Neutral" was ignored. Pro and Anti are shorter and fit in the chart better. :-)

The definition of "Bias towards Obama" is straightforward:

(Pro Obama% / Anti Obama%) / (Pro McCain% / Anti McCain%)

A value of 1 shows no bias, values significantly greater than 1 show a bias towards Obama, and values less than 1 show a pro-McCain bias. For the VP Debate, substitute Biden and Palin for Obama and McCain. The CBS "anti" numbers were not given in the data, but were said to be "similar to overall", so I put in the overall numbers.

Conclusion: other then Fox, the media was seriously "in the tank" for Obama. Which is why the Saturday Night Live spoofs ring so true.