This just in...

The sky is blue, grass is green, Barack Obama is a lying huckster and coverage of McCain is much more negative than that of Obama:

Media coverage of John McCain has been heavily unfavorable since the political conventions, more than three times as negative as the portrayal of Barack Obama, a new study says.

Fifty-seven percent of the print and broadcast stories about the Republican nominee were decidedly negative, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today, while 14 percent were positive. The McCain campaign has repeatedly complained that the mainstream media are biased toward the senator from Illinois.

Obama's coverage was more balanced during the six-week period from Sept. 8 through last Thursday, with 36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative.

McCain has struggled during this period and slipped in the polls, which is one of the reasons for the more negative assessments by the 48 news outlets studied by the Washington-based group. But the imbalance is striking nonetheless.

Sarah Palin's coverage ricocheted from quite positive to very negative to more mixed, the study says. Overall, 39 percent of the Palin stories were negative, 28 percent were positive and 33 percent neutral. Only 5 percent of the coverage was about her personal life. But McCain's running mate remains a media magnet, drawing three times as much coverage as the Democrats' VP nominee, Joe Biden. He was "nearly the invisible man," the group says, and his coverage was far more negative than Palin's. That may be because Biden tends to make news primarily when he commits gaffes.

...

The Wall Street meltdown appears to have been a turning point for both candidates. Thirty-four percent of the stories about Obama's reaction to the crisis were positive, while 18 percent were negative. McCain's coverage, though, went into a free fall after he initially declared that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." By the following week, more than half the stories about McCain were negative and only 11 percent positive, just as Obama's coverage was turning positive by a margin of more than 5 to 1.

The most negative element of the Palin coverage involved scrutiny of her record as Alaska governor, with 64 percent of the stories carrying a negative tone and just 7 percent positive. The coverage of her interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson was a wash, but stories about her subsequent sitdown with CBS's Katie Couric were 57 percent negative and 14 percent positive.

Wow... how surprising... to the ignorant.

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[Wayne from Jeremiah Films]

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