Nobody believes it any more. From Rasmussen:
Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11% who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain. Twenty-six percent (26%) say reporters offer unbiased coverage . . .
The article goes on to break down the numbers by party.
Dems are most likely to think reporters are unbiased most of the time.
They also are least likely to think that the media treats their candidate more fairly.
How to ’splain that?
One possibility is that it’s just a coincidence.
More likely: the perception of “bias” is so subjective that people don’t even realize they’re accommodating it. Take this side by side comparison of the questions that Charlie Gibson put to Obama and Palin, which I’ve adapted from this Hillary Clinton forum:
Obama interview:
(Source: ABC News transcript.)
Did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?
Has it sunk in yet? Do you take joy from the win?
What did your daughters think of you winning the nomination?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?
Palin interview:
(Source: Fox News transcript.)
Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking?
Doesn’t it take hubris to accept the VP nomination, considering how inexperienced you are?
Have you ever met a foreign head of state?
Do you believe America is fighting a holy war in Iraq like I claim you said you did?
Are you sending your son to fight as a task from God?
What are your positions on territorial integrity of Georgia?
. . . Allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO?
. . . NATO treaty?
. . . Iranian nuclear threat?
. . . What to do if Israel attacks Iran?
. . . Al Qaeda motivations?
. . . The Bush Doctrine?
. . . Attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan?
Now an objectively “unbiased” interviewer would put the same set of questions to both individuals. I think everyone could agree on that. If anything, the more hard-hitting questions would go to the Presidential candidate, as opposed to the VP candidate.
But suppose you believe that Obama is the best Presidential Candidate since Washington himself? In that case, to your thinking, questions about hubris or attacking Pakistan or whatever wouldn’t be warranted, because you’ve already decided that Obama is a fine guy — those issues are settled, to your mind, before they’re raised.
If a candidate is prima facie superior, what would be the point of difficult questions?
Put another way: to some peoples’ minds, Sarah deserves the tougher questions; Obama does not. Therefore, lobbing softballs at him isn’t bias — it’s just How Things Should Be Done.
Simple!
Deepak Chopra is trying his hand at political commentary. With a metaphysical gloss, of course. Unfortunately he falls flat on his face. I’m kinda sorry about it, too, I thought he was sharper than this.
Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.” For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don’t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.
Huh?
You’ve missed the mark, Deepak. Way missed. Shadows are psychological projections, not objective fact: Obama is as much Palin’s shadow as she is his.
Holding Palin up as somehow objectively negative–as objectively embodying “anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion,” therefore, does nothing to raise the discourse spiritually. It just feeds into the already half-psychotic partisan frenzy that is distracting so many people from the things that really matter. Roman-style Games, only played out in conversation instead of the arena.
Chopra makes a quick aside to make sure we have no cause to question his own virtue . . .
(Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)
Got it. You’re not a racist. Check.
He’s just looking out for our greater good:
I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message.
Nope, it’s not the least bit helpful, sorry. It’s a justification for some of the worst impulses poisoning our contemporary political discourse, all dressed up in high-falutin’ pseudo psychology speak, is what it is.
You want to add perspective, Deepak? How about this: we need to start accepting that people on both sides of the political spectrum are equally privy to goodness and understanding and love. That Palin can legitimately embody loyalty, bravery, duty, grace, confidence, tradition, selflessness, strength, optimism — virtues every bit as lofty and admirable as those Chopra projects onto Obama.
Chopra sells books because people believe he has advanced his understanding to a point where he has something to share. That only works if he’s actually, like, “advanced.” This column just makes him look like a Hollywoodized mock-up of “advanced.” Silly man.
Paglia. We both lived, as children, in the same town. Not at the same time, but very nearly. My dad taught in the same school where her dad taught.
She mentions it in this new Salon article on Sarah Palin.
Just so you know how unlikely a coincidence this is, the town numbered about 3000 when I was a kid.
Something else I have to wonder. Take a bright, observant, verbal post-WWII young girl with aspirations to be a writer and plunk her down in that setting and maybe some of what happens next is a bit inevitable. I mean, the passage where she mentions Oxford. This is exactly the kind of thing that I experienced as a kid, and I completely “get” how it shaped Paglia’s understanding of gender and feminism. I was shaped by the same sort of experiences.
Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was another version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.
Here’s one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, “Stop her!” as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, “Men!”
I could Bideniarize that anecdote, use it in my own life story, and it wouldn’t even be a stretch.
Brilliant article, incidentally, a highly recommended read regardless of whether your initial impressions of Palin are from the right- or the left-hand side of the Proverbial Spectrum. Not that you’d expect less from Paglia. And I’m not just saying that because she’s my homey ;-)