Clinton AND Obama Should Stop Crying About the Press

Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!! Whenever you hear a candidate crying about their press coverage, it means two things:

1. The voters just kicked their butt.

2. They need somebody to blame who is almost-universally loathed and they’re too self-absorbed to take responsibilty for their own campaign’s derailment.

In just the past two weeks, we’ve seen both of the Democratic Party survivors whine about those meany reporters, most recently Barack Obama. Of course, Hillary Clinton and her hubby have done it here and here and here and here.

But it turns out that BOTH Clinton and Obama have been getting mostly positive coverage, according to a new study from our friends at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

But, according to the most recent update from the Pew weekly monitoring of news coverage (Oh, god somebody’s gotta do it), “fully 58 percent of the public say the press has been fair in the way it has covered Obama’s campaign; 28 percent say the press has been too easy on the Illinois senator – up only slightly from 23 percent in early February.

“The public is somewhat more critical of the way the press has covered the Clinton campaign, 18 percent say the press has been too tough on Clinton while only 8 percent say the same about coverage of Obama. Even so, 58 percent say the press has been fair to Clinton.”

The study found that about 75 percent of the respondents wanted more substantive coverage of the issues. Why? Because of stuff like this: Most don’t know much about Obama’s foreign policy — other than Clinton doesn’t think he should be answering the red phone late at night.

Say the Pews: “Fewer than half the public (40 percent) know a lot or a fair amount about Democratic front runner Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions. This compares with more than half who know at least a fair amount about Hillary Clinton (54 percent) or John McCain’s (52 percent) positions on foreign policy.”

Now, will everybody please stop attributing ANYTHING to the Saturday Night Live Effect?

Posted By: Joe Garofoli (Email) |
March 06 2008 at 04:19 PM