Bi-Polar Bear wrote:Obama was new and a woman and a black (?) man both representing their group head to head for the first time was a program directors dream. Ratings and advertising revenue is what this campaign has been about. If Obama hadn't been in the race it would have been over long ago but the match up was too delicious and profitable.... so the media created this
I agree with this to some extent.
I mean, I think Obama is gifted enough as a politician that he would have risen above the likes of Richardson, Biden and Dodd anyway (all good, experienced guys, but not a hint of charisma, no appealing, overarching message, and in the case of Bill and Joe, a tendency to make many gaffes).
But yeah, I do think the media received Obama's candidacy with overwhelmingly favourable coverage, back in spring/summer last year, and again in January/February this year, exactly for the reasons you list. Ratings, ads. A competitive race just means more revenue.
I disagree, then, with the revisionist take that Obama was battling a disadvantage in the media last year. There were a couple of months in the autumn, for sure, when the media had bought into Hillary's inevitability schtick and buttressed her candidacy that way. But for half a year before that, the media was very pro-Obama. That was documented too - check back
this old post for info about detailed monitoring research that was done.
But I'm surprised, Bear, that you dont notice that it's this very logic that has long since turned
against Obama.
To any reasonable metric, Hillary had de facto lost the primaries after the February primaries (LA, NE, WA, ME, VA, MD, DC, HI, WI). After that, the March 4 primaries delivered a good result for her in Ohio, but in splitting the delegates evenly in Texas when she'd led by a dozen points earlier on, it's also pretty much when the numbers became impossible for her to overturn.
The media, however, largely ignored this reality and went along for months with Hillary's narrative of an enduringly competitive race in which anything could still happen. Even though this directly contradicted the simple math of the matter.
Delegate calculators already showed after March 4 that the odds for Hillary to still win the race were prohibitive, requiring an average of 60-65% wins throughout the rest of the race. Wasnt going to happen. But declaring the race a pro forma matter would have been awful for audience ratings, for ad revenues, for media prestige. So they kept playing up this deathmatch narrative in which two titans went toe to toe. They ignored Mississippi and Wyoming - instead, just like March 4 had been the much-hyped finale before, now it would all be about Pennsylvania!
Six weeks of that ended up with her winning Pennsylvania with exactly the margin she stood to win from the start, and not changing anything about the near-impossible odds she faced to win. And yet still the media went on: two titans! Still battling it out! The primary was by any reasonable estimation de facto over, but the media still played up the race as if it were a photofinish simply because it served their own interests. Only after Indiana and NC did they finally gave up.
So I think your analysis of what's
behind the way the media has covered this race is right on, but it looks like you only recognized the pattern when it hurt your preferred candidate, not when it started benefiting her.
