Though the Washington Post's ombudsman Deborah Howell tries to excuse the preferential treatment her newspaper has given Barack Obama, she's never quite able to escape the damaging admission she makes in her opening sentence.Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party's presumptive nominee June 4. Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain -- and therefore there's more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn't look good...
Later in the piece, Ms. Howell confesses that the Post's unbalanced coverage is just one of many.
This is not just a Post phenomenon. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has been monitoring campaign coverage at an assortment of large and medium-circulation newspapers, broadcast evening and morning news shows, five news Web sites, three major cable news networks, and public radio and other radio outlets. Its latest report, for the week of Aug. 4-10, shows that for the eighth time in nine weeks, Obama received significantly more coverage than McCain...
