Who's winning the media campaign and how well -- and fairly -- have the media covered the individual candidates? The Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest study is out and it shows ... well, the media tend to be kinder to the candidate with the better numbers and less kind to the underdog. Sounds all too human. Then, too:
"Presidential elections are now so heavily polled, with various daily tracks and compilations of state-by-state polls, that every campaign event is almost instantly measured for its political impact and that in turn is immediately analyzed by the political press. Each event has in a sense three echoes. The event is covered. The effect is measured. And the reaction to that measurement by the campaigns is then examined and covered. That pattern becomes a snowball, and the trajectory of any one campaign event is magnified."
Does that ring a bell?
Also interesting is how PEJ came to these conclusions.