Looking for bias in Pilot’s campaign coverage

Lingering concerns about accusations of bias in The Pilot’s presidential election coverage warrant post-election scrutiny. Two qualms drive my concerns — echoes of the vehement claims of favoritism leveled by partisans on both sides, and the results of a recent nationwide media study showing that in a six-week period before Election Day, Republican John McCain was almost twice as likely as Barack Obama to be the subject of negative coverage.

If that is the case, to what degree did The Pilot’s coverage reflect that pattern? How much did wire service material on which we, like most regional newspapers, rely heavily for coverage of national stories, mirror that blueprint? Was that pattern obvious to Pilot staffers handling the daily election stories? Beyond the content and its tone, did our own story placement, headlines and photo choices buttress the national trend?

The answers are full of nuance, but overall, there is scant evidence to support accusations of bias in The Pilot’s election coverage.

There were misjudgments, to be sure, chief among them the absence of a front-page announcement on the day of the McCain-Palin rally in Virginia Beach and the failure to balance a lengthy profile of McCain that ran 10 days before the election with a similar in-depth profile of Obama.

On the national level, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism coded as positive, negative or neutral the tone of 857 campaign stories that ran in 43 print, online and broadcast news outlets between the end of the conventions and the final debate.

At first glance, the numbers are alarming: 57 percent of the stories about McCain were negative and only 14 percent positive. Those negatives for McCain, however, did not necessarily translate into positives for Obama, who scored 36 percent positives and 29 percent negatives. But these findings do not suggest the media functioned as Obama cheerleaders.

The obvious bias reflected in those numbers, insists Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of PEJ, “is the bias that favors winning.” Obama’s negatives were considerably higher during McCain’s post-convention bounce, when polls showed a likely Republican win. The fall of Lehman Brothers in mid-September and McCain’s dramatic but ineffectual response to it coincided with the decline of his positives, Jurkowitz said.

The study’s most lamentable finding showed that strategy, tactics and polling accounted for 53 percent of the coverage — information least useful to voters. Policy issues accounted for 20 percent, reinforcing the “winning engenders winning” phenomenon.

In that context, The Pilot’s 18-page Voter Guide, published 10 days before the election, stands out as an exemplary service to readers, an evenhanded and comprehensive presentation of both candidates and issues that stood in stark contrast to much of the national coverage.

Throughout the election season, because Pilot staffers generated only a small percentage of campaign stories, our four wire services provided most of the election news.

The exceptions: one reporter and one columnist attended the political conventions, and Pilot reporters covered the major candidates’ visits to the region when Virginia became a battleground state.

Tim Tierney, The Pilot’s wire editor, did sentry duty, policing dozens of election dispatches each day from The Associated Press, New York Times News Service, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service and McClatchy Tribune Information Service.

In the daily dose of less-than-objective “little things” — the vast majority of which applauded Obama or dissed McCain — Tierney found ample reason for vigilance. On occasion, he said, liberal bias seemed to play a role. As examples, he cited two New York Times stories: A profile of Cindy McCain and a story that insinuated John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist. Neither ran in The Pilot. “Far more often,” Tierney said, “I felt it was just laziness ... a lack of vigilance.

“We did our best to offer each side an equal amount of space, and we were on guard for bias against the individual candidates,” he explained. “You had to be willing to pass up the latest and greatest New York Times exclusive” when stories just felt wrong.

A more tangible measure of whether bias tinged The Pilot’s coverage is a day-by-day assessment of story presentation. The more than 20 front pages with election stories showed scrupulous attention to balance. Viewing all those pages side by side leads to a single conclusion: Photo for photo, column inch for column inch and headline for headline — in both size and message — one is at pains to find a significant misstep that could be interpreted as a leg up for either candidate.

Tierney, along with PEJ’s Jurkowitz, believes the sheer excitement of Obama’s story is also a driving force behind the media’s pro-Obama impulses. Newness and novelty are every journalist’s weakness. In the end, Obama’s is an exciting story; he is history. Journalists long to write a little piece of it.

Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public.editor@pilotonline.com.