During the presidential campaign, Americans heard a lot about Sarah Palin’s clothes, Barack Obama’s charisma and John McCain’s experience. We heard relatively little about Afghanistan.

In that rugged terrain, violence is increasing and a war many Americans had ignored or even forgotten about is raging once again.

The U.S. economy is struggling, the United States is fighting a two-front war and many businesses are failing. The media covered many of those issues during the campaign, but they neglected the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Media coverage of both wars declined as the presidential campaign began. In 2008, only 0.6 percent of the news coverage was devoted to the conflict in Afghanistan , according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Foreign policy was an important issue throughout the summer. Media coverage reached a frenzy when Obama traveled to the region, but it was ignored when the economy began to struggle. The media’s audience was more concerned with the amount of money in their bank accounts and not with wars that seemed so far away.

Attacks in Afghanistan have made 2008 the deadliest year for U.S. troops since the invasion in 2001, according to a U.N. report on the situation released by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in September.

And 2007 was the second-most-violent year , according to the U.N. report. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan has become one of the most dangerous parts of the world because insurgents are staging their attacks in that area. “When I talk to reporters, they say, ‘We can’t go in there unless we are embedded with coalition units,’” professor Sherry Ricchiardi said. “No one can get in there alone.”

Ricchiardi is a professor at the Indiana University School of Journalism and wrote a story on the lack of media in Afghanistan for the American Journalism Review.

The United Nations estimates that 983 security incidents have occurred this year through August, which is the highest total since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, according to the U.N. report.

A security incident includes bombings, shootings and other violent acts.

“Media have ignored Afghanistan for many reasons,” Ricchiardi said, “including resources being allocated to Iraq, which, at the time, was the hotter war. Now that is not the case.”

The decrease in coverage has been caused by many factors. But the economy and public opinion have had an effect on what stories have been covered recently. People were more worried about losing their homes, than they were about a long-forgotten war.

The press focused on domestic issues not only because of the importance of the story but also because people seemed to have an insatiable desire for more news on the subject. A survey released by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press shows that 70 percent of Americans say they followed the economic crisis with interest during the last week of September 2008, which was up from 56 percent the previous week. The media was doing a good job of informing people about the crisis, but that was all it focused on.

MSNBC.com only wrote one story regarding Afghanistan between July and November this year. But the channel has recently started to cover the region again with its Middle East bureau chief, Richard Engel, producing a series of stories about his time in Afghanistan during recent months. But until the middle of November, MSNBC did not follow the developments there closely. CNN and Fox News have reporters in the region, in Kabul or Islamabad, so they have covered the region with more scrutiny. NBC’s nearest bureau is in Baghdad. Blogs have not been much better. Politico’s Mike Allen only wrote about Afghanistan in his blog when Barack Obama traveled there in July.

Ricchiardi wrote that the soldiers in Afghanistan have been angered by the lack of coverage in Afghanistan. Maj. Cliff Gilmore of the U.S. Marine Corps is stationed in Afghanistan.

“In my opinion,” he said in an email interview, “ the media has pretty much ignored the entire global war on terror in favor of stories about what blows up and how many people die each day. Both the Afghan and Iraq campaigns will succeed or fail on the backs of the captains and the sergeants working in small teams out in the local community.”

The issue is not that the reporters who are covering the war in Afghanistan are doing a poor job. “Most reporters are professional enough,” Gilmore said, “but their supporting organizations aren’t willing to cough up the cash to keep their reporters on the ground with the troops. The return on investment for telling the story about what really goes on each day isn’t good for the shareholders.”

The reporters are filing stories for newspapers and television networks but the problem is that newspapers and networks will not give the spotlight to those stories. “We [the U.S. Army] have noticed that on the Afghanistan campaign there has not been quite as much coverage as when that campaign started,” Army Lt. Col. Mike Moose said. Moose is a public affairs officer at the Pentagon. “But we feel that it is obviously an important part of the global War on Terror.” The Army estimates that more than 200 media members have worked in Afghanistan this year, Moose said.

Smaller newspapers will only cover Afghanistan if there is a local tie, Ricchiardi said. “Newspapers are really fighting for their survival,” she said. “One editor said ‘it has to have a local tie before we even think about putting it on the front page.’”

This economic climate makes war reporting tougher. Coverage of the war is expensive. Security, housing and other resources must be paid for by the companies. The media is worried about the economy, too. Even before the economy began to struggle, the readership of most newspapers and the network ratings were declining. For example, The New York Times Company reported its net income for the third quarter to be a loss of $106 million.

Other companies’ profits have declined considerably from the same time last year. The Washington Post reported a third-quarter profit of $10 million compared to $72 million profit for the same time a year ago. “I think there should be more coverage of the war, but I understand it,” Sean Naylor said. “Particularly with newspapers across the United States going through some very hard times, there just may not enough resources to send reporters and photographers over there.” Naylor is a reporter for the Army Times who covers Afghanistan and wrote a book about the largest battle fought in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led invasion called “Not A Good Day to Die.”

Even before the economy began to crumble, MSNBC and NBC News combined their resources to cut costs. Each company has to decide where to place the focus for its stories. Few media outlets have bureaus in Afghanistan. The New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio maintain small bureaus there, Ricchiardi said. The Associated Press has a large operation that dwarfs the other outlets. Other organizations have reporters based in surrounding areas, such as Islamabad, Pakistan. But the bulk of the resources were devoted to the conflict in Iraq.

Now reporters are returning to Afghanistan. President-elect Obama has made it a priority in the wake of increasing violence in the country. Violence in Iraq is declining and the Iraqi government is on the verge of forcing U.S. troops into a more supportive role. The opposite is occurring in Afghanistan and most reporters are arriving late to the story.

Most media outlets focused their coverage on stories that the public wanted to read and watch, improving their ratings and readership. For two weeks in late September into October 2008, the majority of the coverage was devoted to the economy; we heard nothing about Afghanistan. “I think it [lack of coverage] probably does reflect the huge, dark hole that was created by the economic downturn,” said Chip Jones, author and former reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Jones is the author of “Red, White and Yellow: The Media and The Military at War in Iraq.”

Americans have seen a lot violence during the past seven years and the public is tired of it, Ricchiardi said. The war in Iraq was more difficult than expected and people got tired of hearing about a story that did not get better, she said. “If you talk to the average American, they aren’t that interested [in Afghanistan],” she said. “The average American doesn’t understand what is at stake.”

Stories that focused on who was leading and the strategy that the candidate had used to succeed or fail, also called horse-race coverage, accounted for 63 percent of the campaign coverage during the weeks of Sept. 8 to Oct.16, according to the Pew Research Center.

In future elections, the media needs to do a better job of covering all the issues in a campaign. They spent too much time on each candidate’s strategy and ignored important issues such as the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Each candidate was unveiling his plans for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. All the plans were very similar and included a troop increase. The press did not ask the important questions: Will these policies work, are they what is needed for the specific situation in each country and how much will they cost?

These are the same questions that the media should have asked before the war in Iraq. Many high-profile members of the media have said that they have learned from their mistakes in the coverage of the buildup to that war. That is difficult to believe when few questions were asked about the strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq.

News organizations need to devote the resources to a conflict that has been forgotten by many Americans. They are in the business to provide information to citizens, and they have failed miserably. The news holes are narrower and many media outlets are giving prime space and airtime to the same subjects. “They should stop worrying about the bottom line and get back to informing the people,” Ricchiardi said. “It simply is not realistic to think that they will forget about the bottom line.”

Media organizations are in the business to make money but they also have a responsibility to inform their audience. Edward R. Murrow said of the media, “[This] instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire,” he said. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.” The media should heed his words and begin to do its primary job of informing its audience once again.

Media companies need to change their strategy for covering Afghanistan in these tough economic times. Different divisions of companies should combine their resources, as NBC did to cut costs. Also, rival companies should pool their resources for security and lodging in Afghanistan. They should be in the business to bring the story to their viewers and readers rather than simply for profit. “News organizations that want to obtain a major presence outside of the military’s protective embrace, can pool their resources for living quarters and security and share a compound to cut down on costs,” Naylor said. Embedding with the military, which is already common, is another way to keep costs low, because the food, shelter and security is provided by the military, he said.

Even if media organizations focus more coverage toward the conflict in Afghanistan there is still the problem of viewers and readers not caring about the story. The media needs to spend more time telling the stories of individual soldiers and show the work that the military has done to improve the country. Americans are tired of hearing about the violence, but if the media humanizes the story instead of relaying the story of another roadside bombing, perhaps more people will begin to care. The percentage of the American public that has someone they know involved in these conflicts is very low, so they feel less connected to the wars, Naylor said. President-elect Obama has made Afghanistan a priority so more coverage of the conflict will be seen in the next few months. If the media tells the soldiers’ stories of heroism and the positive missions that they are undertaking, the public should take notice of the conflict again.

John McCain knew how important the battleground state of Missouri was to his campaign, according to the local Kansas City news station KCTV-5’s reporter Surae Chinn. In her exclusive interview, Chinn also discovered how important Kansas City Bar-B-Q was to McCain.

On July 30, 2008, Chinn sat down for an interview with McCain and his wife, Cindy, which had a total airtime of about two minutes and 15 seconds. The reporter closed the segment with this: “We couldn’t leave without asking about Kansas City Bar-B-Q.” McCain’s response to this question received more airtime than almost any other part of the interview.

“It’s wonderful, and I have had it on numerous occasions,” McCain said, “and I have taken some of the Bar-B-Q sauce—which I won’t name the label on it because it might be a commercial,” he laughed. “Oh, it’s not as good as my husband’s,” his wife replied lovingly.

Those were the final words of wisdom given by McCain and his wife during this exclusive interview, words that came from the kind of softball questions local reporters tend to ask during these interviews.

“We tried, still couldn’t pull that name of the Kansas City Bar-B-Q out from him,” Chinn reported, as she signed off. If only she had tried that hard to get the answers to some tougher and more relevant political questions, the exclusive interview could have had a little more potential. These are the kind of softball questions that leave viewers wondering what they just learned about McCain as a leader.

Throughout the presidential campaign, candidates from both political parties gave numerous interviews, on both the national and local level, but it was the questions asked during these interviews that require a more in-depth analysis. Some interviews were aired without more than a second glance, while others made headlines for days, or even weeks after the original interview.

These headline grabbers were often the result of a so-called “tough” interview, where presidential and vice presidential candidates accused reporters of attacking them during the interview. “From my viewpoint, the national political media may either play a very important or a very destructive role in covering a presidential campaign,” said Phyllis Kaniss, the executive director at the American Academy of Political and Social Science and author of “Making Local News.”

Perhaps it is those softer interviews like the KCTV-5 interview that tend to occur in local markets and often air without any controversy that should be given a second look, because it is often these interviews that are just a chance for candidates to stick to their talking points. Small-town news network reporters who have the chance to interview a presidential candidate face-to-face often seem to be “nicer” in their interviews, maybe because they are just excited that the candidate came to town. These interviewers tend to treat the candidates like celebrities, and the interviewer comes off as somewhat star-struck, asking questions that don’t require much of a thought-provoking response.

“Network crews that travel with the campaign may be a little more worldly, a little more skeptical, and not nearly as star struck as a young reporter in a small market meeting a presidential candidate for the first time,” said Scott Libin, Minnesota’s WCCO-TV’s news director. WCCO-TV’s political reporter has 25 years of experience, Libin said, so he isn’t afraid to ask presidential candidates some tough questions. But that isn’t the case for all local reporters.

In other local markets, where reporters tend to throw out softball questions, the candidate gets a chance to say what is important to him or her without the pressure of reporters who want to probe and prod. This can be good for the candidate because without the tough questions and the interruptions, the interview can come off as an extended campaign advertisement.

“Often, the local media will allow a political candidate more time to lay out what he or she would like to do in office — which can be a good thing for audiences not paying too much attention to an election,” Kaniss said. “In other words, because they are less likely to practice ‘gotcha’ journalism, they will allow candidates to speak to the issues, in a valuable way.”

But, in a local newscast that lasts only about a half hour, viewers also need to see an interview where the candidates aren’t only sticking to their talking points. These talking points are what the candidates deliver during national speeches and viewers are looking for a different side of the political candidate.

“I think the public relies on journalists to get past the message of the day, to get past the scripted responses, and force the candidate to respond to questions,” Libin said.

The Lear Center Local News Archive published a report during the 2004 campaign that studied local news coverage and found that the amount of time given to presidential news coverage on local TV stations was about equal to the amount of time presidential advertising was aired. If viewers are already getting that much political advertising while watching a newscast, then they deserve more than just scripted talking points from exclusive candidate interviews.

Reporter Cynthia Fodor from local news station KCCI-8 in Des Moines, Iowa, was granted a five minute interview with Sarah Palin, and she admitted later that she had to agree to submit the topics that she wanted to discuss ahead of time to Palin’s campaign in order to do the interview. Not the best representation of how a candidate thinks on his or her feet. By giving the candidate a chance to dictate the flow of the conversation, the reporter ultimately loses control of the line of questioning.

Other news stations won’t give in to a candidate’s requests just to get the interview. When Palin came to Maine, WCSH-6 anchor Rob Caldwell said that Palin’s campaign would only grant them the interview if they could select the reporter who would conduct the interview.

“We could not agree to that condition,” Caldwell said, as he reflected back on the situation, and so they were not given permission to interview Palin.

Caldwell is a local reporter who had the chance to interview McCain and steered clear of the so-called softball questions. Caldwell asked McCain a series of tough questions, which sparked a lot of public discussion.

Caldwell asked McCain about Palin and for some examples of her national experience. “You say you’re sure she has experience, but again I’m just asking for an example. What experience does she have in the field of national security?” McCain stumbled a bit while he came up with his answer: energy.

The video of the interview has appeared on several websites such as AmericaBlog.com, CBSNews.com and Youtube.com, and drew attention to the power of the local media. When a local interview ends up being aired on national news, the distance between the local and national markets begins to shrink. When a candidate goes into a local interview with the expectation that it won’t be one of their most difficult interviews, they are often surprised.

“The reputation is that local reporters are not as aggressive as the national reporters,” Caldwell said. “Whether that reputation is deserved or not is hard to say. To some extent, it is.”

When a local reporter has the chance to sit down with a political candidate for an exclusive interview, the first thing the reporter says should not be “I promise I’ll stick to my five minutes, sir,” as reporter Cammy Dierking from Cincinnati’s WKRC-TV said with a beaming smile in an interview with Obama. In that interview, Dierking ended the segment by asking Obama, “I know we’re just about out of time, but in about 20 seconds or so, can you tell me how in the world you keep your energy and your strength up during this crazy campaign?” And so Obama spent 20 seconds of this exclusive interview talking about his naps and working out. These are not questions that will get the in-depth answers about issues and policy that viewers need to see. These are the questions that will lead into other easier questions and allow a candidate to stick to their talking points for the entire duration of the interview.

“A lot of times the local reporters are not as experienced as national reporters because they’ve only been in the business a year or two,” Caldwell said. “They think it’s impolite to ask a tough question — they think it’s discourteous to ask a tough question, and I think that is part of the reason.”

Since more and more Americans are getting their news from local television stations, reporters and producers at these stations should use this to their advantage when given the chance to interview a political candidate.

In a Raleigh, N.C., interview with Palin on WRAL, reporter David Crabtree conducted a very friendly interview with Palin, asking her questions about what her greatest surprise and greatest frustration has been so far, and ending the interview with the question, “How is your son doing in Iraq?” Crabtree’s line of questioning focused more on Palin as a person, than on Palin as a leader.

These softer interviews can be a breath of fresh air for the candidates but are not always beneficial for the viewers who are trying to decide which way to vote. But these interviews are also a positive media hit for the candidates.

“The presidential candidate benefits from appearing with what is usually a well-liked local anchor and looking like they are in a personal relationship with this surrogate for the local audience,” said Kaniss, who also teaches courses on local media at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

After a string of “nicer” interviews, a candidate may be surprised to come face to face with a tough local interviewer.

“When presidential candidates give interviews to local TV reporters,” Kaniss said, “they are banking on a basic fact about those reporters: they know relatively little about the subject because they are generalists, and therefore tend not to be able to ask very hard-hitting questions.”

Reporter Barbara West from Orlando’s ABC affiliate, WFTV, was one of those local reporters who was able to ask the hard-hitting questions. Her interview with Joe Biden received national recognition after she was accused of asking questions that were too tough. West asked Biden questions about Barack Obama’s “spreading the wealth” comment and likened him to a Marxist, saying: “You may recognize this famous quote, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?”

Biden did not appreciate the question, to which he responded: “Are you joking? Is this a joke? Is that a real question?” Following the interview, the Obama campaign cut off the station from any future interviews, including an already scheduled interview with Biden’s wife.

When Obama called a local news reporter from WXYZ-TV “sweetie,” during a campaign stop in Detroit, it caused a buzz that landed on the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune and Newsday. It also landed the reporter, Peggy Agar, an exclusive interview with Obama after he called to apologize for the comment, during which she asked him, “What’d you make of that whole sweetie thing that happened between us?” Agar spent a good part of the interview discussing this instance and basically played into the entertainment factor of the comment.

Again, this is not the kind of question that reveals in-depth answers about issues and policy. It is more likely the kind of question that gets the station higher ratings for a brief period of time.

“All too often,” Kaniss said, “the media — sensitive to ratings and readership — blew up the most entertaining topics and allowed itself to be led by what I would call ‘sexy’ campaign topics.”

The entertaining topics also made their way into numerous amounts of national coverage. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer sat down with an interview with McCain, and the highlight of the interview that the network continued to play was, “Is Sarah Palin dragging down the Republican Ticket?” This topic was more prominent than the issues McCain was speaking about in the exclusive one-on-one interview.

Although the candidates have accused the national media for being too tough in their line of questioning, a strong majority of the public think otherwise, according to a report from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The report found that strong majorities of the public believe the press has been fair to McCain, Obama and Biden, but more believe the national press has been too tough on Palin. The media has a responsibility to the public to ask the right questions and get the unscripted answers. Whether these questions are too tough or not should ultimately be left to the decision of the voters who are using the candidates’ responses to evaluate their qualifications.

Overall, the generalization that local news media give easier interviews is not entirely accurate, because there are reporters out there who are asking the tough questions in the local markets and getting the candidates to think on their feet. But there are also those media who still exhibit somewhat of a star-struck quality when interviewing a presidential candidate.

Caldwell had some advice for other local reporters who have the chance to interview a political candidate. “You’ve got to know your stuff,” he said. “You have to think in advance about the questions — try to think about the answer the candidate is going to give, and then come up with a different way to get at the issue.” Maybe more of the local news media will start to listen.

On Nov. 5, I thought I could see the pollsters and reporters seeking each other out for congratulatory handshakes.

They held their heads up high and said, “Well done!” and “Bravo!”

The reporters need to sit down.

Although the final polls were prophetic, the breakdown of data in the news was misleading or inaccurate.

From September until Election Day, I followed three news media and analyzed their poll coverage. I watched MSNBC, read the Los Angeles Times and read the blog Talking Points Memo.

MSNBC was lax about reporting the margin of error — the statistic expressing the potential sampling error in a poll. Not reporting this statistic gives the public an imprecise representation of which candidate slips or gains in the polls.

Talking Points Memo and MSNBC were consumed with the horserace. This kind of poll focuses on the scoreboard rather than candidates’ discussion of the issues.

All three media were guilty of creating a narrative to fit the polls, for the public to take hold of and follow. Pollster Nate Silver wrote on his political website FiveThirtyEight.com, “Data might be used badly… that might mean weaving together a narrative that isn’t supported by the demographic evidence.”

I followed the media’s coverage of polls in this past election because I found myself surrounded by numbers. Falling numbers, rising numbers — numbers that were represented by red and blue lines and bars that waltzed through graphs on newspapers, television and the internet.

Nancy Mathiowetz , a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research said that in polling during recent decades, “There has been a proliferation of the number of organizations…with regards to the presidential elections.” Pollster.com, a website that publishes poll results and analyzes them, gathered data from 38 different public opinion organizations for this year’s presidential election. According to the different organizations’ websites, more than half of these organizations were established after 1980.

This year the numbers spat out by pollsters began to overwhelm other news.

The two weeks before the election, talk of polling increased exponentially. Every day Josh Marshall would discuss polls on his blog Talking Points Memo. He wrote on Nov. 1, “We’re spending a lot of time these days churning through all the latest and almost endless number of polls.”

On Oct. 23, Rachel Maddow said on her MSNBC show: “If you read the presidential polls like a Red Sox fan like me reads the box scores every day…you probably feel as if this race is stacking up pretty nicely for Barack Obama.” The polls turned the election into a game.

In the article, “Leading Economic Indicators, the Polls and the Presidential Vote,” Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, followed economic data and trial heat polls to forecast the winner of the 2008 presidential election in early August. They wrote, “Given the weak growth in leading economic indicators, the forecasts point to a cautious prediction of a Barack Obama victory.” When I read the article I stopped. Why was this necessary?“

Before there was polling there was horserace coverage,” said Scott Althaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois . “That isn’t new.”

Before FiveThirtyEight.com became increasingly popular, Silver’s primary occupation was as a baseball statistician and analyst for a sports media company. He wrote on his website, “What we do over there and what I’m doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries.” In the last few days before the election, bloggers and reporters were throwing out poll numbers from all directions. Following polling data is like following baseball statistics — in trying to predict what will happen next. They are followed because they are fun to follow. Polls take away, however, from the coverage of issues in the news.

Althaus said some argue that not everything can be covered by cable news because of the limited amount of time they have. Horserace polls, he said, “might drive out coverage of the issues.”As an America gluttonous for polls continued to feed, the media created stories to frame these numbers.

Do you remember early September and watching the Republican National Convention? The crowd was a rolling sea of McCain-Palin signs. The crest of its wave was made out of homemade posters sprinkled through the crowd that read, “Palin Power!” or “Hockey Moms 4 Palin!”

Soon after the RNC, John McCain had a slight edge in the polls — but within the margin of error. While a CBS poll had McCain up by two points and CNN had both candidates at 48 percent, a USA Today/Gallup Poll had McCain at 54 percent and Obama at 44 percent with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, was worried. On Sept. 8 he wrote: “… the McCain camp has a consistent and aggressive message. They’re constantly on the attack and largely defining the debate. The Obama campaign is largely reactive, parrying the attacks.”

In a Los Angeles Times article from Sept. 10 titled, “Palin Bounce has Democrats Off Balance,” the authors looked at polls that showed McCain’s growing lead. Reporters Peter Wallsten and Janet Hook found that rather than being too reactive, the Obama campaign was being too aggressive. “Obama has responded aggressively this week to Palin’s presence on the Republican ticket,” they wrote. “…some Democrats are now worried about the perils of Obama’s strategy.”

After the RNC, Obama slipped in the polls. But the conclusion as to why this was happening was dubious — was this just a convention bounce? Was Obama too aggressive? Too reactive? In continuing to speculate and wonder why the polls were changing, the media provided a narrative to explain Obama’s falling poll numbers.

Thomas Patterson, a professor of political science at Harvard University, wrote an article for Public Opinion Quarterly titled, “Of Polls, Mountains. U.S. Journalists and their Use of Election Surveys.” He wrote that journalists craft superficial images to match the candidates’ support in the polls. When I spoke to him, he said the reporting the public sees has been degraded with the help of polling. “[People] feed into a press narrative,” Patterson said. “As the financial crisis hit and McCain began to slip in the polls, he became less appealing.”

At the end of September, Wall Street went into a tailspin. When I walked around Richmond, I would hear snippets of conversations about the economy — mostly with people asking each other, “How bad is this?”

The polls had started to turn during this time. On Sept. 17 a CBS/New York Times Poll had Obama up by five points among likely voters with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. A week later that poll remained stagnant.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a blog titled, “Desperate McCain Reacts to Polling Financial Crisis,” in response to McCain asking Obama to call off the debate. In the Los Angeles Times, Noam M. Levey wrote in the article, “Obama Nudges His Lead Since Debate,” that Obama was making many strides, “convincing Americans that he can handle the toughest challenges facing the country….” On MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” for Sept. 24, Maddow said, “New polls out today show John McCain trailing Obama … so is that the strategy here, try to use an economic crisis as an excuse to hit the reset button … because the campaign is going poorly?”As McCain fell in the polls, he was painted as a scheming strategist who would do anything to change his poll numbers. As Obama began to move up in the polls he was confident — the candidate who could handle crises in a calm manner. But maybe what the media was saying was true. I was starting to wonder: Is it the chicken or the egg? Do the members of the media create narratives out of the poll numbers, or do the poll numbers just fit the narrative of the campaign that already exists?

When I called Althaus, I asked him this age-old question. He said he thought horserace polling factored into the narrative of the coverage. But Althaus said: “It’s definitely a chicken and the egg problem. It’s hard to sort out what is driving that [coverage].”

I asked him for some advice — what reporters should keep in mind when covering these polls. “The most important things to keep in mind is that polls are merely pieces of information that do not speak for themselves,” he said, “and the margin of sampling error is just one of many things to watch out for.”

It appears that the media has been taking these pieces of information and putting them into the frame of a bigger picture. There’s more. Not all of the information such as margin of error is even given to audiences.

After the first presidential debate this year, David Gregory of MSNBC discussed potential reasoning for the candidates’ actions during the debate. “Barack Obama is cautious about appearing angry,” Gregory said. “He seems/appears to have won that, in terms of the polling. More voters think that McCain has gone negative than Obama.”

What polling was Gregory talking about? Horserace polling? Specific polling regarding McCain’s negativity? What were the numbers here? What was the margin of error? No specific information was given while Gregory read into a poll that the viewer knew nothing about.

I spoke to Carolyn Funk, a survey researcher and associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, and discussed the differences between print and broadcast news. Funk said, “In television you can’t go into as much detail, while on print you’re getting more information.”

Every time the Los Angeles Times showed a poll, there was a blurb at the bottom of the page that reported how the poll was done and the specifics behind the poll such as sampling error. But wait. How long does it really take to give a couple of tidbits on cable news — such as what the poll was, or how accurate it was?

On “The Rachel Maddow Show” for Sept. 18, Maddow questioned the impact McCain was having among female voters. “Among white women, Obama is ahead 47 to 45 percent,” Maddow said. “Before the Palin pick, it was McCain who was ahead among white women… Now, he’s down among white women by two points.” The margin of error, which was not reported in the broadcast, was plus or minus three percentage points.

The New York Times reported the same polling numbers in their article, “McCain Seen as Less Likely to Bring Change, Poll Finds,” as an even divide among white women because the numbers were within the margin of error.

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo made the same mistake as Maddow. He wrote on Oct. 24, “A new poll gives Obama his first lead in Georgia , 48-47 .” The InsiderAdvantage Poll Kurtz wrote about, was within the margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points. What Kurtz wrote was inaccurate. Obama was not in the lead in Georgia.

When these numbers are not reported, the information becomes misleading and can be misinterpreted by the public.

A poll in itself is not the issue. Although its value can be open to discussion, it is the reporter that must keep a check on his or her coverage of the polls. While too much coverage of the horserace can lead to the abandonment of other issues, it is the lack of information given about these polls and the stories that are created to surround them that could delude the public.

“Joe the Plumber” wasn’t actually running for office, but he certainly became a focal point of last year’s presidential campaign. Republicans rallied in support of Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher after the third presidential debate on Oct. 16, when Republican presidential candidate John McCain proclaimed that Wurzelbacher would face much higher taxes under Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s tax plan.

McCain’s denouncement of Obama’s plan may have boosted his image and encouraged his supporters, but there was a little problem with his attack. His description of the effect the Obama plan would have on Wurzelbacher’s finances simply wasn’t accurate.

In reality, Wurzelbacher’s taxes would go up only if his income increased to more than $200,000 per year and his small business would be exempt from Obama’s requirement to provide insurance coverage for all of its workers. McCain’s working-class hero wouldn’t be greatly harmed by Obama’s plan after all.

Despite the untruth, the McCain campaign, its supporters and the media continued to promote “Joe the Plumber” and he became a defining symbol of the Republican campaign. For the most part, the mainstream media allowed the “Joe the Plumber” myth to persist, probably because it provided an entertaining story.The “Joe the Plumber” tax story is one of the more prominent examples, but it is certainly not the only time during this campaign that untruths were reported as fact in the mainstream media while less-known “truth squadding” Web sites such as FactCheck.org, which filed several reports dealing with the inaccuracies in the “Joe the Plumber” story, fact-checked the candidates’ campaign ads, speeches and debate performances in an attempt to convey reality. In fact, some fact-checkers reported that not only had McCain incorrectly portrayed the way Obama’s tax plan would affect Wurzelbacher’s finances, but he had also mispronounced his name, calling him “Joe Wurzelberger.”

The “Joe the Plumber” story provides evidence of the wide range of fact-checking in the election — the fact-checks ranged from the trivial and entertaining (the pronunciation of Wurzelbacher’s name) to the more serious (the actual misrepresentation of the tax plan). But, more importantly, the story also brings to light some of the problems fact-checking Web sites faced during the campaign in trying to communicate which information was accurate. Despite its inaccuracies, the “Joe the Plumber” frame remained a fixture of both McCain campaign rhetoric and media coverage of the Republican campaign.

Fact-checking was certainly more wide-spread during this election than it has been in the past. In 2004, FactCheck.org was the premiere “truth squad,” and one of the only Web sites with a fact-checking desk. In fact, in a 2007 book titled “UnSpun: Finding Fact in a World of Disinformation,” which he wrote with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org. Brooks Jackson, FactCheck.org’s director, described a “flurry of ‘fact-check’-style reports in the final weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign,” but said that group of reports had represented a definite departure from the norm at the time, when fact checking was generally rare.

During this election, though, it sometimes seemed that everyone had a fact-check desk. The St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly started a fact-checking branch, PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post started another fact-checking blog. Most major news organizations, including the New York Times, CNN and Fox had fact-checking desks. Even blogs that did not have an official “truth squad,” such as DailyKos.com, frequently posted blurbs that pointed out inaccurate statements candidates had made. ABC and CNN both included fact-checking segments during their televised coverage of all three presidential debates and the vice presidential debate. Between late August and election day, CNN also ran at least three different segments pointing out inaccuracies in both campaigns’ advertisements as part of its election coverage.

Different fact-checking groups used different scales to evaluate statements’ accuracy.FactCheck.org categorized candidate’s statements as “true,” “false” and “almost true,” among other headings, while PolitiFact.com ranked statements on a “truth-o-meter” that included measurements of accuracy such as “pants on fire” for glaringly untrue statements. Statements with “pants-on-fire” ratings included some made in an Obama-Biden ad that suggested that McCain opposed federal funding for stem-cell research and some in a McCain-Palin ad claiming the Obama-Biden ticket opposed clean coal. Another independent fact-checking site, Ameritocracy.com, published articles evaluating accuracy instead of categorizing them with short headings. The Washington Post’s fact-checking blog, written by Michael Dobbs, used a “Pinocchio” measurement system — the more “Pinocchios” a statement registered, the less true it was.

But, regardless of what scale they used or what material they covered, fact-checking sites provided a wealth of information about inaccuracies. An article on Oregonlive.com titled “Fact-checking: Does Anyone Care?” reported that FactCheck.org staff members had posted five new entries on the site during the third presidential debate. The Washington Post’s fact-check crew posted 13. PolitiFact.com’s server was down during the debate, but staff writers sent out fact-check results over a live feed on another Web site, Twitter.com.

Fact-checking pioneers such as Jackson and Jamieson seem pleased with how much fact-checking has expanded in the last four years, but believe there is still more room for improvement. On Dec. 12, 2008 , the two released the results of a survey proving, they said in a press release summarizing the results, that though “we saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before … millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.” The survey concluded, among other things, that more than half of American adults believed Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses, a claim that was prominent in McCain campaign ads and was the basis for the “Joe the Plumber” story. In reality, few businesses would see such an increase under the plan.

“There were three major fact-checking Web sites during this election,” Jackson said in an interview. “We were the only one in 2004. A lot of major media outlets had them, and yet it’s not enough. It doesn’t counteract the false impression advertising creates.”

In the article, Jackson and Jamieson explained that voters’ pre-dispositions could influence what the believed, but that there was a less abstract obstacle: Visibility. Far more people view political ads than visit FackCheck.org, which was read by 462,678 visitors on its best day during election season, the article explains. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign aired two inaccurate ads claiming that McCain planned to cut Medicare benefits a total of 17,614 times. Each airing was viewed by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and the campaign spent more on those two ads than FactCheck.org spends in an entire year.

“Political ads are viewed hundreds of times, and fact-check blurbs were only posted once,” Jackson said. “We’re working against the weight of advertising in target states — people get bombarded.”

Not only did more people see inaccurate campaign ads than the fact-check blurbs correcting them, mainstream media added to the problem by presenting inaccurate information in prominent places. Though there were not viewership figures available for specific articles, a New York Times online media guide reported that the paper’s Web site averaged 143,488,000 daily viewers, more than 310 times the Web traffic FactCheck.org received on its best day. The New York Times average viewership does not include people that may have read articles in a hard-copy of the paper.

But, those frequently read front-page pieces often contain inaccurate information. For example, an Oct. 17 recap of the debate published on the front page of the New York Times mentioned McCain’s “Joe the Plumber” anecdote but did not include any mention of the questions fact-checkers had raised about the story’s accuracy.

Heather Collura, a journalist who worked for USA Today during the election season said she hadn’t necessarily fact-checked everything candidates said during a speech or press conference before writing an article. She said it was her job to report on what the candidates were saying and let the public draw its own conclusions, not to evaluate the truth of candidates’ statements. She said she had occasionally looked into glaringly inaccurate information and had never intentionally reported anything inaccurate, but had generally left fact-checking candidates to “truth squads.”

Because Web sites such as Factcheck.org focused only on fact-checking, not regular campaign coverage, visitors to the sites were specifically seeking out fact-checking information and probably had a vested interest in the campaign. Meanwhile, people who visited the New York Times’ Web site for sports coverage or reviews of their favorite television shows often saw headlines on stories containing inaccurate information, even if they did not set out to do so. This means that many of the people who read about “Joe the Plumber” or Obama’s assertions about McCain’s policy on stem-cell research probably never saw fact-checks correcting the inaccuracies.

Official corrections regarding incorrect information in stories were also rare. In fact, a brief look through the corrections that were published in the New York Times during election season revealed that the paper did not correct reports about what candidates had said during debates and speeches. The few corrections to election-related stories were published inside the paper with little attention drawn to them.

Jackson said mainstream media should take more responsibility for fact-checking.

“They should be more careful about reporting and correcting false information,” he said.

Collura said it could be difficult to decide when publishing a correction was warranted, as corrections were generally used to correct reporters’ mistakes, not candidates’.

“It’s tricky,” she said, noting that candidates’ errors usually went uncorrected as long as the reporting was accurate.

Relying on fact-check desks to correct inaccuracies presented a problem during the election, though, because even on frequently visited mainstream media Web sites, it was often hard to access fact-check results. On the New York Times’ Web site, for example, stories containing inaccurate information could be easily accessed from the homepage. Reports about fact-checking were published on the political coverage section of the Web site and took at least four clicks to access.

Therefore, the fact-check reports were only seen by people that were already interested enough in the election to view the site’s political page. The fact-checker’s not-so-prominent location also meant that the onus of finding out whether or not candidates were being truthful was placed on voters instead of on the media, and that, in all likelihood, only select voters ever saw the Times’ fact-check results.

Jackson said accessibility and visibility went hand in hand, and that part of the struggle fact-checkers faced was that only people with a vested interest in politics saw fact-checking results, leaving the average American voter uninformed.

Jackson also said one problem with fact-checking was that Americans were not necessarily conditioned to evaluate statements logically. He said schools could help with this problem by teaching critical thinking and using Web sites like FactCheck.org as a classroom tool.

“People have to be trained to think logically,” he said.

Problems with visibility, accessibility, corrections and logical thinking have left some fact-checkers frustrated, but not disillusioned. In their piece introducing the survey results, Jackson and Jamieson said Americans’ misinformation about election issues did not bode well for the nation’s future, and that untruths in advertising campaigns made candidates hard to trust. Though the results are frustrating, Jackson and Jamieson say they are not discouraged.

“Not at all,” the piece concludes. “If we hadn’t tried, it might have been worse.”

Even though many Americans are still uninformed, some campaign officials said fact-checking had affected the campaign as politicians began to more carefully consider how they phrased their ads. One McCain aide , who asked to remain anonymous because of a campaign policy that prohibits campaign aides from identifying themselves, said he understood the benefits of fact-checking but that it could get “ridiculous.” He said candidates were so worried about being made to look like liars that they were afraid to be forthcoming and candid.

But, Jackson said, he didn’t think fact-checking was greatly affecting campaigns.

“They’ll use it against the other side,” he said. “But mostly [they think] it’s just noise. I haven’t seen evidence that they’ve modified their behavior in any but the smallest ways.”

Jackson also said fact-checkers’ major concerns were not with campaigns. Instead, he said, their goal was to keep voters informed.

“We access statements at their merits,” he said. “Our audience is voters.”

He said that though he did not believe influencing campaigns should be journalists’ main goal, it was a bonus.

“If someone is out there saying they can’t lie because we’ll expose them, good,” he said.