Having read some of what Fox News is writing about Romney, I think Romney would be happy to give up some of that attention to Ron Paul.
In other news, Ron Cox isn’t mentioned as often as Ron Paul. And this report didn’t even notice he was a candidate, so I think the report is biased.
On a more serious note, in their information, they show Romney at 13,000 to Ron Paul’s 248, and say that’s the worst case of bias.
But look at the New York Times numbers:
Ron paul is mentioned 21,700 times, McCain only 15,500 times, and Hunter only 535 times. And Romney? It must be a typo, their chart says Romney only had 87 mentions.
The more liberal the news source, the more often Ron Paul is mentioned compared to the other candidates.
Lastly, they had the strange notion that all the bottom-tier candidates should, in aggregate, be mentioned as often as all the top-tiered candidates.
That is stupid, if they were mentioned as much, they wouldn’t be bottom-tiered candidates.
It speaks to the bias of the New York Times that they talked more about the candidates who have no chance of winning than they did about our serious candidates who could win.
Of course, what I’d really like to see is a comparison for each of these sources between mentions of ANY republican candidate vs ANY democratic candidate. Want to bet the LA times has mentioned democrat presidential candidates a LOT more than the 1700 or so times they mentioned republicans?
Think about that. the LA times TOTAL mention of republican candidates has been about 2000, while USA today has mentioned them about 7 times as much, or 14,000 times.
This circular argument is exactly what I don't like about the current primary process. Candidates are declared to be "second-tier" because they aren't brought up much in the media, and then the media ignores them because they're "second-tier"! It becomes a preposterous situation where Republicans allow the mainstream media to decide who in their party is "electable".
Take Duncan Hunter as an example. Almost everyone on FR supports him, or would support him if not for the fact that he's not widely considered "electable". But that's not because his ideas are worse than Rudy's or McCain's. It's because the media pimps Rudy and McCain, so the people who don't pay much attention to anything but sound bites think Rudy or McCain are their Republican choices, so in the polls the people who haven't heard any other names pick someone like that. The media takes that as their cue to continue to ignore the other candidates whose politics would be more aligned with their base, but who get ignored, get low poll numbers because of it, and continue to get ignored based on those poll numbers.
Whether you love or hate Ron Paul, his supporters' strategy of coming out in force to win various online and real-life polls (a strategy borrowed from Freepers, BTW) is a smart one. It becomes increasingly hard to ignore the so-called "second tier" when one such candidate keeps winning the media's own polls. The media has resorted to deriding their own polls; they may very well be correct that their polls are being "freeped" by Ron Paul supporters, but in doing so they make their own bias so obvious that hopefully people will start to judge candidates by their ideas rather than by who the media tells them is the most popular.