Oh CNN.com and your misleading headlines.

Journalism at its finest.  I hit the CNN.com homepage and came across a link to this story about yesterday's races.  The link text was also the headline:  McCain leads handily, Dems deadlocked after contests.

Now, if you were just skimming the headlines, how would YOU think the contests turned out yesterday?

Of course, the REAL pictures is a lot different:

Sen. Barack Obama swept Saturday's Democratic contests, giving him considerable momentum heading into Sunday's Maine caucuses and three primaries Tuesday.

John McCain, however, was handed a starkly different message from the GOP, as voters in Louisiana and Kansas indicated they weren't ready to support the Arizona senator. Washington, however, backed the Republican front-runner over former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, according to state party officials.

So, Obama and Huckabee won EVERY state yesterday, putting Obama ahead in "vote-getting" delegates... and the thing the editors took away from that was "Dems are deadlocked", "McCain in the lead"?  Really?

•  The longer Obama can stay out of the frontrunner

  spot, the better. Because one day the country is going to wake up and Obama will have locked this thing up while no one was paying attention.

  by slash196 on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:10:31 AM PDT

  •  was going to say something similar

    Obama is always the underdog

    and in many ways he always will be

    long may he be perceived that way

    don't tell anyone, but he's +75 in pledged delegates
    and 19-11 in States to date

    shhhhhh

    keep it a secret

    by sweetmags on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:13:43 AM PDT

  •  CNN certainly helps no one pay attention

    by assa9 on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:20:29 AM PDT

  •  that's one way to look at it

    I hope you're right.  We might as well try to use the media bias to our advantage.

    by davidkc on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:33:20 AM PDT

  •  Obama sweeps 3 states, Huckabee takes 2 ! Yahoo

    got it right..With great pics ! Now that is a story and headline wurthy of further perusal..

    by Johnny Rapture on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:33:56 AM PDT

•  Yes, I saw that too.

  The major television networks do not want to admit that Obama has tremendous momentum.  I would love to see Obama win as handily in most of the next contests and see if CNN can ignore it then.

  by sunbro on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:13:30 AM PDT

•  I always read the snarks

  about Clinton being favored on CNN (i.e. Clinton News Network).

  I actually believe it now.  

  It could be based on caution though, they don't want to  Shustered.

  by zreeb on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:14:38 AM PDT

  •  CNN has always been in bed

    with the Clintons. One of the rewards in seeing Obama as our next President would be to see how a network like CNN acts when Hillary is just a Jr. Senator again, and Bill is just another former President.  Frankly, I am growing really tired of all the Networks covertly, by their headlines, innuendos, and what ever picking sides and throwing all their on air support towards the favored candidate. They are in the NEWS business, sure they have the right to support whichever candidate they wish to support, but to do it using their access to the airwaves, with the full knowledge if they play it as actual news people who don't know better will believe them. I find this as an insult to the American people, the people they are supposed to inform. Actually I find it much more than insulting, I find it outrageous.

    by Vera Lofaro on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 10:08:56 AM PDT

•  Is Carville or Begala writing CNN's copy?

  Heh.

  CNN's spin on Obama's Saturday sweep reads like a defensive press release from Hillary headquarters.

  by MJB on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:14:45 AM PDT

•  McCain does lead handily

  McCain can LOSE every contest that remains and STILL have enough delegates to be the nominee.  It's almost a mathematical certainty.  Huckabee would have to win 83% of the remaining delegates and the Repubs are now pretty much done with the winner-take-all portion of their primary schedule.

  ... and of course the Dems are essentially tied - regardless of which delegate count you use.

  by kto9 on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:16:30 AM PDT

•  To be fair

  McCain DID win Washington State ;)

  by NMLib on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:16:33 AM PDT

•  Primary coverage too compartmentalized

  The media go to such lengths to separate the Dem and Rep races.  I wish that in addition to showing how each party's candidates are doing next to each other, they would also routinely show for instance the current race in a 6-bar chart showing the votes received by each current candidate.  It would be a lot more obvious that the Dems are kicking ass if you could see that Obama and Hillary both have tall bars while the Reps have noticeably shorter ones -- and not just because they're splitting the Republican vote 4 ways, either.

  by Alden on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:18:31 AM PDT

•  How about "Obama leads by only a few delegates"

  That's the headline I've noticed several times in the past few days.  The same stories could have been headlined "Clinton trails in delegate count after unforeseen but steady decline of support".

  by bdbd on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:21:21 AM PDT

•  technically its true

  they are neck and neck in the delegate count.

  by SensibleDemocrat on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:24:07 AM PDT

•  Headlines are incapable of being the whole truth.

  If they point you to the general subject of the discussion, anything goes.

  by ohwilleke on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:28:17 AM PDT

•  MSNBC too

  I loved this one: McCain stumbles on way to nomination:
  Losses to Huckabee in Kansas, Louisiana likely won't affect GOP nomination

  Way to interject your own narrative into the headline itself... he may be stumbling, but he's still on the way to the nomination!!!

  CNN has changed their headline now, by the way; it now reads "Obama gains momentum; McCain still leads handily."  Do you think you did that?  :)

  by renaissance grrrl on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:29:58 AM PDT

•  CNN sucks

  Clinton News Network

  by davidkc on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:32:44 AM PDT

•  CNN's almost as bad as Faux Noise.

  Their executives are a bunch of right wing hacks, just like Fox's.  Their coverage is flagrantly slanted right, and they have their own lineup of right wing bobbleheads to compete with O'Reilly and Hannity - Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace...

  And MSNBC didn't win any cool points with me last night with their coverage, or their repeated re-running of their Hillary Clinton hit piece.  (Yes, I'm an Obama fan, but I don't like seeing the media smearing people.)

  by meldroc on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:39:06 AM PDT

•  All corporate media

  is right-wing.  That's the way it works. See Noam Chomsky's 'Propaganda Model' if you aren't familiar with it.

  by Gamma on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 09:55:22 AM PDT

  •  And that would mean,

    by their support of Hillary Clinton, she is actually right wing too? I would not go that far, however, I do believe she is the candidate of the corporations, they want her in charge, if they have to give up Bush. If the people win, they lose.

    by Vera Lofaro on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 10:12:28 AM PDT

    •  Yes

      Hillary Clinton is not right-wing because the corporations want her in charge, they want her to be in charge because she's right-wing.

      by Gamma on Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 07:08:18 PM PDT

•  It's actually a much better

  narrative for Obama to have to appear to be fighting for the nomination, rather than be "winning it handily" or "running away with it".  

  He isn't actually winning it handily, but leads in delegates and certainly has the momentum.  So while we here at Dkos can see the writing on the wall - dude's gonna be our president (this Edwards support is all verklempt with joy that it looks like Obama's going to be our president)!!!!!!!!

  =====still it serves our eventual nominee to have a narrative out there that this was a fight between passionate people who understand the stakes, rather than a story of entitlement or an easy skate or even momentum propelled by the media story.

  The longer the media refuses to hand this to Obama, the more the story becomes about the man himself earning the momentum and winning the nomination by the force of who he is and what he stands for.

  by delphine on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 10:13:13 AM PDT

  •  BTW

    none of my post is snark.  Tears spring to my eyes at the prospect of Obama being our president.  

    Would I like to see some things different about his campaign?  Sure.  (And some of it has changed as he adopted some of Edwards' tone - he admitted himself in Boston that his own campaign had been infected at times with caution and triangulation, and I have seen that change over the last few weeks.)

    But aside from being an excellent candidate he carries a message of empowerment not only to those of us on the left who've felt disenfranchised, but to people across the nation who haven't felt represented for a long time, and to people around the world - electing either of our two choices but especially Obama sends a message to the rest of the planet that people like George Bush are not the face of America.  Not by a longshot.

    Anyway, so there it is.  Didn't want anyone to think I was being snarky.

    by delphine on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 10:21:45 AM PDT

•  Compare that to the headline on HuffPost

  "Obama Dominates...McCain Stumbles"

  CNN needs to stop living in their glory years of the 90's.  They seem stuck in the first Iraq war/Clinton years when they actually had some integrity.

  by Jentutsy on Sun Feb 10, 2008 at 10:26:03 AM PDT