The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg had a follow-up piece on Friday's debate headlined "The Next Day, a New Debate on Who Won." The story described the McCain and Obama camps' attempts at "influencing the public perception of who won an encounter that produced no clear winner or loser."

Except--is it really true that the debate produced no clear winner? The initial polls pointed to Obama as a winner; CNN's poll released Friday night found that 51 percent of respondents thought Obama had done a better job, vs. 38 percent for McCain. CBS's Friday night poll of undecided voters had 40 percent calling Obama the winner, 22 percent saying McCain. Clearly, "winning" a presidential debate means improving your chances of getting elected, so polls of the public would appear to offer the best evidence of who "won."

Rutenberg alludes to these polls, yet dismisses them: "Mr. Obama appeared to have an edge in the various snap polls taken the night of the debate, though these are notoriously unreliable," Rutenberg wrote in the second half of the 18th paragraph--his only mention of polling data.

It's not clear how the polls immediately after a debate are "unreliable" gauges of who the public thought won that debate; while polling has its limitations, surely it's more accurate than pundits' speculations about who the electorate would think the winner would be. A less time-pressed USA Today/Gallup poll taken the day after the debate, and probably not available to Rutenberg before his deadline, confirmed the results of the "flash" polls: 39 percent said Obama won vs. 28 percent for McCain; among those who actually watched the debate, it was 46 percent Obama vs. 34 percent McCain.

But for Rutenberg, the public's own response seems to be rather beside the point; his story is about "campaigns go[ing] full-bore to convince the news media, and ultimately the public, that their candidate won," since it's "a common belief in presidential politics" that "many viewers base their judgment not necessarily on debate performance but on what they read and see in the days afterward."

In other words, it's the media's job to tell the public whom they thought won the debate.

The Washington Post (9/28/08) gathered reactions from "foreign policy analysts and others" to last Friday's debate on international policy, and what's striking is how hawkish the Post's circle of foreign policy experts is. The lineup included Henry A. Kissinger--inevitably--and a bunch of hawks from right-wing think tanks and/or the Bush administration: Danielle Pletka of AEI, Michael Rubin of AEI and Rumsfeld's Pentagon, Patrick Clawson of WINEP (who co-wrote a book with Rubin) and David Makovsky of WINEP. Michael O'Hanlon works at the centrist Brookings but is a famous Iraq hawk.

Those who aren't obvious hawks mostly have Republican connections: Michael J. Green of CSIS worked for G.W. Bush's NSC, Karen Donfried of the German Marshall Fund was an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Soderberg used to work for Bill Clinton and now advises Michael Bloomberg. Ronald D. Asmus was a former Clinton aide but is best known for his advocacy of NATO expansion. For a change of pace, they've got David M. Walker of the Peter G. Petersen Foundation, who's a deficit hawk.

The only bona fide dove on the list would seem to be Russia specialist Stephen P. Cohen of Princeton. You'd think the disasters of the Bush years would create interest in new ideas on international policy--but at the Washington Post, a debate between alumni of Bush's Pentagon and State Department really is considered balanced.

Update: I mixed up my Stephen Cohens--the Russia expert is Stephen F. Cohen. The Post's Stephen Cohen is an expert on Pakistan who used to work for the Reagan State Department. So virtually everyone in the Post's rolodex of foreign policy experts is either a hawk or has Republican ties.

Veteran reporter Robert Parry muses on his Consortium News website (9/27/98) that "perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a U.S. presidential debate to deal - substantively and honestly - with wrongful actions by the American government" (more...)

Continuing to prove himself as tenacious as the Washington Post is doctrinaire, economist Dean Baker provides another example (9/28/08) of how the "Post editorial board occasionally just makes up numbers to advance its arguments" (more...)

The National Council of La Raza's campaign to encourage "media networks and political candidates to separate themselves from hate groups and hate speech" targets (9/23/08) talk radio star Michael Savage (more...)

FAIR associate Norman Solomon tells Real News viewers (9/29/08) of lessons to be drawn from corporate U.S. media's non-coverage of what was big news overseas during the run up to war on Iraq—U.S. spies used the U.N. arms inspection process to identify future bombing targets and track Saddam Hussein's movements (more...)

To illustrate what he deems corporate media's "arbitrary and often contradictory standards set for Barack Obama as a black candidate," Tapped blogger Adam Serwer (9/26/08) quotes a New York Times "Political Memo" by Patrick Healy that complains the candidate "is sometimes out of sync with the visceral anger of Americans who are losing their jobs and homes" because "his tone and volume, body language, facial expressions and words convey a certain distance from the ache that many voters feel." After noting that "this analysis is contradicted by all available polling information," Serwer asserts that "race is the very reason this article was written": (more...)

Reporters of integrity quitting their jobs over what amount to unidentified ads in local news has prompted journalist groups to condemn "broadcast outlets using video news releases that are produced by pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers to look like news reports." Emily Udell of In These Times has (9/18/08) more on the matter: (more...)

L.A. Times media reporter Matt Welch (9/26/08) says it's "no wonder John McCain 'suspended' his presidential campaign Wednesday to focus in a bipartisan manner on a grave national crisis," considering how the same move during NATO's 1999 bombing of Kosovo has been called "a masterful political stroke": (more...)

In "Facts, Fables and Fibs" (9/18/08), Time reporters Michael Scherer and James Carney attempt to sum up the truth and falsity of presidential campaign claims with a gimmicky chart that places Obama and McCain commercials on a grid that separates ads into "Mostly True" and "Mostly False" on the one hand, and "Serious" and "Silly" on the other.

In an intro, the Time reporters acknowledge that "McCain has been far quicker to throw the truth overboard--both in advertisements and on the stump," but you'd never get that from the grid itself, which seems chiefly concerned with achieving symmetry, both political and graphic. The journalists write: "We decided to spread the highest profile allegations, good and bad, across a grid measuring both accuracy and substance so you can be the judge."

Well, no--you can't actually judge for yourself which candidate is less truthful based on Time's description and evaluation of campaign ads. But you can get a sense of the strikingly weird judgments of corporate journalists--like when you see that the "Bridge to Nowhere" is deemed to be among the very most "serious" issues of the election, whereas the degree of threat posed by Iran is placed among the "silly" subjects.