Washington Post: We hearted Obama

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: November 8, 2008

The ombudsman for the Washington Post has confirmed what everyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past year already knew: The Post was in the tank for Barack Obama.

Deborah Howell writes that the Post provided much more friendly coverage of Obama than of GOP nominee John McCain; in addition, she writes, the Post did it at the expense of real issue coverage.

Among her findings, the Post ran more than twice as many positive op-ed pieces about Obama than McCain, Obama appeared on the front page more often than McCain and the Post published more Obama stories in total than stories about McCain.

Most disturbing, though, the Post provided more than twice as many “horse race” stories—or articles about polls—than it provided on issues.

More than twice as many.

This follows national media trends, Howell writes:

Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

For his part, Post assistant managing editor for politics Bill Hamilton said, “There are a lot of things I wish we’d been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don’t at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion.“

Ahem.

Is Hamilton really saying that his reporting staff is more “uniquely able” to produce “narrative” stories than investigative journalism, like reporting on issues? It sure looks that way.

In any event, here we have an editor at a major national newspaper in the nation’s capital explaining that his newspaper had “a larger purpose” than reporting on the issues of the presidential campaign—to “convey and explain” the campaign, apparently, through polls.

The devolution of journalism is complete.

The question now is, will the Post—and the rest of the traditional media—recognize the error of their ways in time to provide tough and fair coverage of Obama’s administration?

Given Hamilton’s unapologetic explanation for why his newspaper failed to do its job during the campaign, I don’t hold out much hope.

Read the rest of Howell’s column here.