Media’s Powerful Anti-Obama Bias in March 4 CoverageRandy Shawbyline‚ Mar. 06‚ 2008In hours of CNN and MSNBC election coverage Tuesday night, the most important fact of all was virtually ignored: how votes translated into delegates. We heard all night about Clinton’s alleged success in the “big states,” and about how she had to “win” Texas to keep her newfound “momentum,” but the definition of “winning” and “momentum” were not explained. It was like a football game whose announcers extolled the number of hard tackles and great catches without explaining that it is the team that scores the most points that wins. Since the Democratic nomination game is all about getting the most delegates, this should have been the chief focus. But promoting this reality would have reduced excitement about Clinton’s success, since even before the Texas caucuses she only picked up a net eleven more delegates across the four states, and Obama’s projected seven delegate victory in the caucuses reduced this to a net four. Focusing on the delegate count would have also confirmed the Obama campaign’s insistence that the March 4 primaries had actually reduced Clinton's chances of securing the most elected delegates. If the roles had been switched, the media would have described Obama’s popular vote wins as “too little too late,” and focused on the mathematical impossibility of him securing the most delegates by June. But the media became so vested in the storyline of Clinton as the “comeback kid” that it ignored the truth. |