MSM Loves Those Democrats – Especially That Guy With No Experience

Is anyone surprised at this?

If campaigns for president are in part a battle for control of the master narrative about character, Democrat Barack Obama has not enjoyed a better ride in the press than rival Hillary Clinton, according to a new study of primary coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

From January 1, just before the Iowa caucuses, through March 9, following the Texas and Ohio contests, the height of the primary season, the dominant personal narratives in the media about Obama and Clinton were almost identical in tone, and were both twice as positive as negative, according to the study, which examined the coverage of the candidates’ character, history, leadership and appeal—apart from the electoral results and the tactics of their campaigns.

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On the Republican side, John McCain, the candidate who quickly clinched his party’s nomination, has had a harder time controlling his message in the press. Fully 57% of the narratives studied about him were critical in nature, though a look back through 2007 reveals the storyline about the Republican nominee has steadily improved with time.

What was the negative selling point on McCain? That he was a unreliable conservative:

Claims that he is not a reliable conservative and may alienate the conservative core of the party accounted for fully half of all threads studied during this time (and 88% of the all negative threads).

Now on to all the positive hugs and kisses from the MSM. Clinton:

Fully 67% of the assertions about her as a person were positive, versus one-third ( 33%) negative — numbers almost identical to Obama.

Clinton had the most success projecting the idea of her preparedness to lead the country—to take the 3 A.M. phone call as her well-known ad proclaimed. A full 38% of all character assertions spoke to this trait. This message was much more clearly asserted than any other about Clinton.

And the MSM’s favorite…the messiah:

Overall, the coverage of Obama has been far more positive than not. During the height of the primary season, January 1 through March 9, 2008, fully 69% of the prominent personal narratives studied about Obama carried a positive message.

The most prevalent master narrative about the Illinois senator was established early: the idea that he represents hope and change. More than a quarter of all the assertions studied about Obama (28%) projected this idea, What’s more, the attempts by his critics, or skeptical journalists, to suggest that the promise of change was empty or overblown, never got much traction in the press. Only 4% of the assertions studied were rebuttals of the narrative that Obama represented change.

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The skeptical narrative that gained the most traction in the press during the period when Obama was racking up his lead in the primaries was about lack of experience. Still, this appeared only half as frequently as the positive trait of representing change and hope, amounting to just 12% of the personal narratives studied.

Did they say lack of experience? Well the WaPo had the guts to run a front page article today on that experience and to say its lacking is being generous:

Already famous for his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama entered the Senate with more than the usual aspirations about the impact he could have.

So in 2005, he had his office arrange informal seminars so that experts on health care, the economy, energy and education could brief him. “I’m not running for president,” he told a group of experts at his Capitol Hill office in the spring of 2006. But he said he had a “national voice” and wanted to use it.

When Obama changed his mind and decided to run for president after only two years in the Senate, however, he effectively dismissed the importance of policy proposals, declaring in one speech in early 2007, “We’ve had plenty of plans, Democrats,” and in another: “Every four years, somebody trots out a white paper, they post it on the Web.” He cast his “new kind of politics” in terms of his ability to transcend divisions and his unique biography and offered few differences on issues from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates. …

Obama has not emphasized any signature domestic issue, or signaled that he would take his party in a specific direction on policy, as Bill Clinton did with his “New Democrat” proposals in 1992 that emphasized welfare reform or as George W. Bush did with his “compassionate conservatism” in 2000, when he called on Republicans to focus more on issues such as education.

Obama’s campaign is “clearly politically transformative, it’s clearly from a policy standpoint been cautious,” said James K. Galbraith, a liberal activist and economist at the University of Texas at Austin who had backed former senator John Edwards in the early primaries.

Hope and change baby!

Its all about his charisma.

New ideas on governing? Who needs them when everyone loves you. In bygone eras it was all about the new ideas your brought to the table, new directions and policy. Now, in the age of fast food and instant access to anything and everything its all about charisma and charm.

But there is one big policy the WaPo forgot all about. He is the only Democrat who wants to sit down with the tyrants of the world with no preconditions. Now thats something to hang your hats on Democrats!

More here.

Curt

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