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the power Obama's cult of personality campaign pollster Frank Luntz asked college students at a pre-election focus group to name the presidential candidate they were going to vote for. All of them said Obama, but when Luntz followed up by asking them to name an accomplishment of the senator, nobody could name one, not a single accomplishment. A recent Zogby poll commissioned by John Ziegler in which 512 Obama voters were asked 12 multiple choice questions and a Wilson poll that also included McCain voters found that Obama voters were significantly less politically informed than McCain voters; 35% of McCain voters answered at least 10 correct compared to only 10% for Obama voters. Voters who knew which party controlled congress voted by a margin of 56 to 43 for McCain. A particularly telling question revealed that 82.6% of Obama voters could not correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot. In contrast, only 6.2% of Obama voters failed to identify Sarah Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter and 13.7% failed to identify Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes. The striking disparity in the performance of the McCain and Obama voters suggest a strong media bias exists that is affecting the political information being presented to these two different groups of voters.

Interestingly, the Wilson poll also asked voters to identify the media source of their news. Those exposed to Fox news got the "congressional control" question correct 64-24 (+39) whereas those exposed to network news only got 48-39 (+9). Fox news viewers voted 70-29 for McCain while viewers of the network newscasts voted 62-37 for Obama and those exposed to national newspapers voted 64-36 for Obama. These stunning differences lend credible support for the thesis that the mainstream news media including network newscasts and national newspapers as well as certain cable news channels (MSNBC and CNN) have a decidedly liberal bias that favored the Democratic candidate. Just how long the media's love affair with President elect Obama will continue only the news media can answer but this country certainly deserves better from its press since the founding fathers guaranteed a free press in the constitution as a further check on the power of government. From this past presidential campaign it now appears that the press is in cahoots with the government instead of playing its traditional adversarial role. As Sean Hannity recently declared "2008 will be known as the year that journalism died".

Learn more about this author, Ken Roebuck.
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