The Liberal media's bias against Liberals.

One of the phrases which boggles my mind when I hear right wing Americans use it is the "Liberal media". For any Brit who has ever seen American electoral coverage, and who has ever watched how the British media cover elections, this notion is simply laughable on it's face.

Now it's official:

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative. Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

And that's before we get into the fact that the US media are much more willing to buy into Republican talking points like "character" and "which candidate the electorate might prefer to have a drink with", rather than concentrating on policy as the British media would be much more likely to do.

And one of the reason that Republicans want to talk about "character" rather than policy is because their policies are electoral poison.

And while McCain has been complaining recently that Obama's coverage abroad has been dwarfing the coverage of his own campaign, he might want to thank his lucky stars for that as Obama's coverage is negative 72% of the time.

Time for John to stop whining.

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Tags: John McCain, Barack Obama, media coverage, liberal media