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I’ll give you a hint: it’s not “election”…

…the point is, Chris Matthews has a man crush on Obama.

Last night I almost fell out of my seat when I heard the “Hardball” anchor make the allusion that Barack Obama’s speach turned him on in, essentially. At least that’s how I interpreted, when he said “I felt this furrowing up my leg,” so tell me if I’m completely off the mark. Then again, Olberman and Brian Williams (who was on afterwards, just not on the YouTube video) seemed to pick up on it as well.

Here’s the video (you can also see it if you click “read more” at the bottom of the post). Matthews’ admission comes at 0:30.

In all seriousness, the point is the media in general, but specifically MSNBC, seems to be particularly kind to Barack Obama (and on a side note, particularly unfavorable to Hillary Clinton). I am a regular watcher of MSNBC–that is, I tend to watch them for my election coverage–but I had to switch the channel after hearing so much sycophantic babble from Matthews, Olberman, and even Williams, the NBC anchor. This was a particular circumstance, but I’ve noticed the trend before.

And, to be sure, my accusation could be disparaged as particular and unsubstantial, but it seems to be agreed upon by others as well as independent studies on election coverage. Here is a recently released study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. The CMPA enumerates their methods:

These results are from CMPA’s 2008 ElectionNewsWatch Project. They are based on a scientific content analysis of 765 election news stories (22 hours 15 minutes of airtime) that aired on the flagship evening news shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX (the first 30 minutes of “Special Report with Brit Hume”, which is most like the network news shows in content and presentation) from December 16, 2007 through January 27, 2008.

Here is the overarching finding:

Hillary Clinton is getting the worst press and Barack Obama the best press of any major presidential candidate, and Bill Clinton is also getting negative reviews, while the gap in good press between John McCain and Mitt Romney is narrowing, according to a new study of TV news election coverage by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. The study also finds that FOX’s evening news show had the most coverage of policy issues and the least coverage of the campaign horse race.

And finally, the most telling statistic:

Sen. Barack Obama has led the race for good press and Sen. Hillary Clinton has lagged the farthest behind. From Dec 16 through Jan 27 five out of six on-air evaluations of Obama (84%) have been favorable, compared to a bare majority (51%) of evaluations of Mrs. Clinton…NBC’s coverage has been the most critical of Clinton – nearly 2 to 1 negative (36% positive and to 64% negative)

No wonder I find it astounding that Matthews chose the adjective “objective” to describe his verdict on Obama.

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The What starts with an “E” and ends in an “ection”? by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.