Poll: Half of U.S. says press pro-Obama

Half of Americans think the press is trying to help Sen. Barack Obama win the presidential election, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports.

In an automated survey of 1000 likely voters, Rasmussen found that 49 percent of respondents believed reporters would favor Obama in their coverage this fall, compared with just 14 percent who expected them to boost Sen. John McCain. The number of Americans who see pro-Obama bias in the press has increased by five percent in the last month.


According to Rasmussen’s numbers, less than a quarter of voters – 24 percent – now trust the press to report on the election without bias.

“People are looking at reporters the way reporters want us to look at Wikipedia,” said Rasmussen Reports CEO Scott Rasmussen. “It’s useful information, but you’ve got to check the source.”

Rasmussen suggested that glowing coverage of the run-up to Obama’s trip abroad may have contributed to the perception that reporters sympathize with his campaign.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, suggested a different source for the public’s concerns about bias: the press itself.

“As the press covers reports of disparities in amount[s] of coverage,” Jamieson said, “the belief, often reinforced in conservative media, that the press are biased against the Republican should increase.”

Jamieson pointed to a study released last week by the Tyndall Report, a media-monitoring group, that showed Obama vastly outstripping McCain in press coverage, as the kind of report that would “magnify this perception of bias among non-Obama supporters.”



Among the largest group of non-Obama supporters – Republicans – fears of slanted coverage did run especially high, with 78 percent of respondents saying the media would attempt to assist Obama’s bid. A mere 21 percent of Democrats suspected similar bias in favor of McCain.

Rasmussen said he was unsurprised that Republicans suspected pro-Obama leanings among reporters, as the finding was consistent with his firm’s previous polling on media bias. If anything, Rasmussen said, he was surprised that there weren’t more respondents alleging that the media supported McCain.

“There’s been a netroots push to say the media’s biased in the other direction,” Rasmussen explained. According to this poll, any such online effort has not shifted public opinion more broadly.

It’s not just the general election that’s bringing out voters’ concerns that the media might be supporting Obama. Asked a backward-looking question, about which “major presidential candidate” – Obama, McCain, or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton – had received the most favorable coverage overall, 57 percent said it was Obama. Twenty-one percent of respondents named McCain, with 11 percent choosing Clinton.

This result follows similar polling data that emerged during the Democratic primaries. A Pew survey conducted from May 30-June 2 showed 37 percent of Americans felt that Obama received preferential treatment from reporters during the Democratic primary contests. Only eight percent of respondents in that poll said the press favored Clinton.

Another Pew poll, conducted in late December 2007, showed 25 percent of Americans believed that coverage of the 2008 election was biased toward Democrats, compared to just 9 percent who saw a pro-Republican bias. In 2003, a similar question showed a more even split in responses: 22 percent of voters said the media tended to favor Democrats, but 17 percent saw bias in support of Republicans, suggesting that conservative voters are especially concerned about media coverage in 2008.

Rasmussen said his firm would continue to poll this question “roughly once a month,” but may test it more frequently in the fall, when the pace of the campaign picks up and political tensions are running higher.