"I'm Shocked To Find That Gambling Is Going On In Here!"

The ombudsman for the Washington Post acknowledges that the paper's coverage was biased toward Barack Obama.  Key graphs from the column:

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Post reporters, photographers and editors -- like most of the national news media -- found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

Sadly, this "news" comes a little too late.  It will be interesting to see if some of the other MSM outlets come clean.

Update on Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 11:21AM by Joe

I just read Ed Morrissey's commentary on the Washington Post's Claude Rains moment.  Ed makes an insightful observation about the way the paper's ombudsman framed the coverage of Sarah Palin.  Rather than contrast how Palin was covered compared to Joe Biden, the ombudsman should have scorched the paper for its dogged investigations into Sarah Palin and its seeming indifference to anything resembling investigative journalism where Barack Obama was concerned.  From Ed's post:

The hell with Joe Biden.  Howell never answers the real issue here — why did the Post, and the rest of the national media, go on the attack with Sarah Palin and not with Barack Obama?  The two candidates had a similar amount of time in politics, and Palin had more executive experience than Obama.  Obama ran for the top job, while Palin ran for VP.  And yet the national media parachuted dozens of reporters into Wasilla and Juneau looking for dirt and scandal, coming up with a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion (which Palin bought herself) and the Troopergate story that turned out to be a nothingburger and was already known prior to her nomination.

Where were the Post reporters doing the same thing in Chicago?  Why didn’t the Post want to look at the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama’s only executive experience prior to his run for the presidency? The media never bothered to make a hundredth of the effort on Obama that they did with Palin, and they had two years to do it.

That’s the issue Howell should have addressed in her column.  We already know that the Post gave imbalanced coverage of Obama and McCain, as did most of the rest of the media.  And now Howell gives the mea culpa in her first column after Election Day, when it’s far too late to do anything about it.  Where was Howell during the last three months?  Why wait until the election is over to speak up?  That’s an answer in itself.

Ed's upset, and I don't blame him one bit.