Posted by
Chris Field on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 2:51:25 PM
If you just read "
Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race" in today's New York Times without thinking or without looking at the polling information, you would walk away with exactly the impression the Times is hoping most of its lock-step, blindly following readers will -- blame whites for any political problems Obama might have.
But if you're not a lemming, you'll start to wonder who is to blame for the political, black-vs-white racial tension that the Times appears to believe is running rampant in the U.S. -- a view average Americans would likely say is held mostly by the we-know-better-than-you elites on the East Coast.
Let's take a quick look at just a couple items the Times fails to point out:
First, the Times article implies (or at least the reader can easily infer) that white Americans are the voters with the racial hangups, which is why the fact that Obama garners so much more of the black vote. This paragraph is supposed to reveal how well Obama is doing courting the black vote:
Among black voters, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, Mr. Obama draws
support from 89 percent, compared with 2 percent for Mr. McCain. Among
whites, Mr. Obama has 37 percent of the vote, compared with 46 percent
for Mr. McCain.
That graph reveals that blacks are voting by race, not whites. You see, Mr. and Mrs. Editor, 89-2 is a bigger discrepancy than 37-46. If anyone at the Times were either honest or smart, that would have been seen for what it is -- racial voting by a racial bloc . . . that's not white.
A second, more egregious lie-by-omission is the Times' coverage of its own poll, a pretty graphic for which they even took the time to create (see below).
Reporting on the voters' opinion of Obama by race, the Times says:
After years of growing political polarization, much of the divide in
American politics is partisan. But Americans’ perceptions of the fall
presidential election between Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, and
Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona, also underlined the racial discord that the poll
found. More than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable
opinion of Mr. Obama; about 30 percent of white voters said they had a
favorable opinion of him.
Reading that, you would again think that whites had a real problem with the black candidate and were, therefore, the real source of the "racial discord" that is the focus of the entire article. Two important points are missing from this paragraph's analysis of the Times' poll:
1) White's aren't happy with either candidate. Interestingly, white voters have a 31 percent favorable view of Obama (notice how the Times calls it "about 30 percent" to make it seem lower) and have a meager 35 percent favorable view of McCain. Those two numbers are so close that they're practically insignificant and reveal nothing about the racial biases of white voters.
2) More telling is the unreported views blacks have of the white candidate. The Times breathlessly reports that "more than 80 percent" of blacks have a favorable opinion of Obama, but they don't bother to tell the reader blacks' opinion of the white candidate. According to the Times poll (again, see below), only 5 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of McCain. For the Times, it's worth reporting that only "about 30 percent" of whites view the black candidate favorably, but the Times neglects to report that only 5 percent of blacks view the white candidate favorably.
Sure, someone will point out that blacks skew Democratic, so they're more likely to support the black candidate. True, but why write the article?
The point was to show the racial divide among voters -- especially whites' inability or refusal to support the black candidate. In order to do that, the Times had to be its usual dishonest self.