On the much ballyhooed ratio of negative and positive coverage for each campaign

[jpgray]

The question that will never see the light of day is this: "What sort of coverage can be expected if one campaign is ahead and better-run, thereby generating fewer negative stories than the other?" Should our media downplay the greater negatives of the failing campaign and emphasize the scarce negatives of the winning campaign? Should editors surgically slice and dice the major stories of the day to always wind up with a 50%-50% split of positive and negative stories for each candidate? They already attempt to do this in the cable coverage by providing party flacks from both sides to analyze the stories of the day, but even in this case if the balance of stories is more negative for one candidate than another, false "balance" is hard to come by.

Bias can exist, however. Bias in 2000 couldn't have been any clearer--Gore was running ahead for much of the race, but even two years in advance of election day willful dislike of his candidacy from the press corps was front and center. Every report from Ceci Connelly or Kit Seelye was tinged with a thinly-disguised contempt; on the part of Seelye gaffes and blunders were made up out of whole cloth, using doctored quotes and purposed misinterpretations. See "invented the internet" or the Love Canal "gaffe" for evidence. From the campaign journalists' false reports these supposed gaffes trickled down into opinion pieces, wherein ostensible liberals such as Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd followed a trail of false facts to troubling insights into Gore's character. We saw similar things from Dowd regarding John Kerry's apocryphal "who among us doesn't enjoy NASCAR?" quote, or Obama's equally false denial of a child's proffered fist bump (turned out the kid wanted him to sign his hand).

Bias can exist in campaign reporting, but when one camp is behind and stumbling and the other is ahead and confident, it's hard to imagine a fair and accurate way of providing wholly "balanced" coverage. The question should be: "Would it be fair or accurate to pretend the two camps are on an equal footing at this point?" The reason this question isn't asked is because the answer is clearly "no."