John McCain's Bias Against John McCain

The Pew Research Center recently conducted a study of possible journalistic bias in 2008 presidential election coverage, and — as you might imagine — it stinks… for John McCain, specifically…

Slightly fewer than a third of the stories about Obama were negative, whereas more than a third were positive and about the same number were neutral or mixed. More than half of the stories about McCain cast him in a negative light, whereas fewer than 2 in 10 were positive, according to Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Wow. That's a lot of anti-McCain bias. And that's totally not fair. Totally, totally not fair. Not fair for the country. Not fair Republicans. And, mostly, not fair for McCain.

So, a bullshit journalist, I have to ask myself, Where is this bias coming from?

And, after searching tirelessly for nearly seven minutes (smoke break included), I found my answer on Politco. They wrote a long article with lots of theories and explanations and words — things I just can't wrap my head around — but this one little bit seems to be the money shot…

As it happens, McCain's campaign is going quite poorly and Obama's is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

And then it hit me: Oh yeah! It's because John McCain is running a shitty, shitty, shitty campaign. Politics aside, he's just not doing his job well. George Bush didn't have these issues four years ago. That's because Karl Rove — terrible as he is at driving policy — is fantastic at driving message. And now, John McCain's campaign can't even solidify a single message.

One might even be led to think that John McCain — what with his unvetted, inexperienced choice of VP; his omnipresent gaffes and mis-speakings; his dogged determination to use negative attacks; his late game decision to not allow the press access to him; and his poor performance in televised debates — that John McCain is throwing himself under the bus.