Is the press favoring Obama? Film at 11.

The McCain campaign has been complaining about the media favoring Obama, lately, following heavy press coverage of Obama's trip overseas. (Ironically, this was a trip McCain practically dared him to take, putting a sign up on his website tallying the number of days since Obama had last been in Iraq.) Their complaints seemed to be somewhat validated by studies showing that Obama gets more coverage. However, more is not always better.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University has a new study out that shows that Obama's coverage is less favorable than McCain's:

...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...

The same group, headed by Robert Lichter, did a study in 2006 that found the media were biased towards Democrats in the midterm election. This recently led to the amusing irony of Bill O'Reilly, who had praised Lichter's earlier work, bringing him on the air to complain about the new study, calling it "misleading" and an "enormous mistake."

Of course, the new study probably won't change any minds; O'Reilly is not alone in his stubbornness about his views of media bias. This topic seems to be nearly impossible for people to think about objectively; confirmation bias seems to be especially strong when it comes to how people see the press, leading people to only remember coverage that jibes with their preconceptions of media bias.