Pew Reseach shows large majority of voters say MSM wants Obama to win election
Following up on the report that media coverage of McCain has been significantly more negative than for Obama, Pew Research has the results of a poll that show the vast majority of voters believe the MSM wants Obama to win this election.
In recent presidential campaigns, voters repeatedly have said they thought journalists favored the Democratic candidate over the Republican. But this year’s margin is particularly wide. At this stage of the 2004 campaign, 50% of voters said most journalists wanted to see John Kerry win the election, while 22% said most journalists favored George Bush. In October 2000, 47% of voters said journalists wanted to see Al Gore win and 23% said most journalists wanted Bush to win. In 1996, 59% said journalists were pulling for Bill Clinton.
In the current campaign, Republicans, Democrats and independents all feel that the media wants to see Obama win the election. Republicans are almost unanimous in their opinion: 90% of GOP voters say most journalists are pulling for Obama. More than six-in-ten Democratic and independent voters (62% each) say the same.
The overall margin is 70%-9%, voters who think the media’s in the tank for Obama vs. McCain. That should be telling the journalists out there something but it’s likely to just be dismissed out of hand. And they’ll just keep on whining that the free-fall the media’s in is everyone else’s fault but their own.
