IBD EDITORIALS – Have the feeling Barack Obama gets more favorable coverage than John McCain? It's not just a perception, it's a reality, according to yet another study confirming media bias.

The right-of-center sector of the blogosphere has for months maintained that the mainstream media are "in the tank" for Obama. The observant bloggers were right.

"Coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable — and has become more so over time," says a Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism study that looked at newspapers and cable news shows from the end of the conventions to the last presidential debate. Coverage of Obama, naturally, was much more positive than negative or neutral. His ratio of favorable stories to overall stories was more than 2 1/2 times as large as McCain's.

The second most unfavorable coverage went not to McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, but to Obama's, Joe Biden. "Limited coverage" of the Delaware senator "was far more negative than Palin's, and nearly as negative as McCain's." The small sample size makes any conclusion irrelevant, though.

The study called Biden "nearly the invisible man" because he's been largely ignored. In our view, his frequent gaffes should earn him extended negative coverage, but he's gotten a pass. Scornful reporting is reserved for Republicans such as Palin, who got bad press in 39% of the stories about her. Only 28% were positive, a third neutral.

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