You Just Have to Laugh -- The West Virginia Primary

If you look at the Drudge Report, the big headline today is "Obama gets Run for His Money from Inmate number 11593-051". The story is about the results of the Democrat primary yesterday in West Virginia; Obama got just under 60% of the vote and a federal prisioner in jail in Oklahoma got 40% of the vote. It was a major embarassment for Obama; imagine losing 40% of Democrats to an unknown convicted felon.

I just thought the story was interesting but unimportant; then I saw the same story covered by ABC News. Here is the headline: "Federal prisoner earns votes against Obama in West Virginia primary". If I had not already read the story, I would never have even bothered to read the ABC one. It is no big deal for some unknown candidate to pick up a few votes in a primary. That is what the ABC story sound like from the headline. The problem, of course, is that it was not a few votes; it was 40% of the votes. So, even while reporting the story, ABC was slanting the headline to minimize the impact of the news.