CNN Has Difficulty Accepting Obama

I've noticed that CNN's political coverage this year has been heavily, indefensibly, shamelessly biased toward Hillary Clinton. That's to be expected -- after all, two of her top political advisers, James Carville and Paul Begala, are former CNN employees, and continued their "political coverage" for the network even while they were Hillary employees, until the network got complaints and had to boot them.

But I've been keeping tabs on CNN more closely in the past two weeks, since Barack Obama has all but locked up his place as the Democratic nominee, even by Carville's own admission. One would think that they'd probably give a little less publicity to Senator Clinton, since she's nearly out of the presidential picture, right?

Wrong. Let's look at a rundown of just the last forty "blogs" on their faux-news gossip column "The Political Ticker" -- and I assure you that it has been no different for the past two weeks:

Number of "Positive" Hillary Posts: 7

Number of "Negative" Hillary Posts: 1

Number of "Positive" McCain Posts: 6

Number of "Negative" McCain Posts: 5

Number of "Positive" Obama Posts: 1

Number of "Photo" Obama Posts (The only posts about any candidate which deliberately have no commentary): 2

Number of "Negative" Obama Posts: 10

There you have it, folks. And the most striking thing isn't the fact that stories which reflect negatively upon Barack Obama are those which appear most often. For me, the most striking thing is their refusal to say print anything which might make Hillary Clinton look bad. On the other hand, maybe that's just a reflection of the fact that Obama and the GOP have stopped attacking Clinton. Most of the Ticker's content is just inter-campaign trash talk.

What's more, most of the time CNN uses their "Political Ticker" to back up their front-page political posting. So the bias in the ticker is equal to the bias they feature on their front page.

Let's look at their front page, at a random time, to see what their coverage looks like. We'll use, oh... right now as an example:

I see three political items, one of which is just a webcam feed to an Obama rally, so that's relatively positive for Obama. The other two allow anti-Obama folks to use CNN.com's front page as a mouthpiece for their particular views -- one, in which McCain calls Obama's foreign policy ideas of diplomacy (you know, the ones that don't involve war) "Reckless;" and the other, which allows Geraldine Ferarro, a Clinton supporter and former Carville co-worker who has already proven herself a bigot, to slander Obama, calling him "Terribly Sexist" without foundation or examination.

And remember this all comes weeks after it became clear that Hillary Clinton would not be the Democratic nominee.

I'm not saying CNN shouldn't report on every little piece of controversial "trash-talk" they hear in a political speech, like they do. They're certainly allowed to do that.

What I'm saying is, readers should take their "coverage" with a grain of salt. They've got some cards they're not showing.