Bias in election coverage?

• Eddie
• 11 years ago
• Categories: election 2011, Media
• Tags: bias

Like everyone else, I find you can get better political analysis from chicken entrails than from Claire Robinson. But it seems she can count and use a ruler and what she discovered is interesting. In last year’s election campaign, the four biggest newspapers featured 138 pictures of Key to 80 of Goff, and Key’s were twice as large on average.

OK, not every picture of a given size is good and equally good – I’m sure Key wasn’t happy with this picture, for example. Robinson tried to account for this by rating pictures on how happy or otherwise the leader looked in each picture, and the picture’s position in the paper.

At the end of the day, getting a picture in the paper is usually a good thing for a wannabe PM, and those basic numbers are pretty telling.

Now, some might whine that this shows the msm is unfair and biased. And they could back that up by pointing to the undeniable preponderance of rightwing premises in the editorials, op-eds, business papers, and reporting of our news outlets.

I say: yes, the msm is part of the establishment and inherently stands for the conserving the status quo but the answer is to use the msm and its weaknesses for you, not treat it as an enemy.