A Tale of Two Headlines

Two headlines at Memeorandum this morning:

African American Voters Shift Support to Obama

and

Obama getting a cool reception from black America

Um...right. So which is it?

Take the second article first:

Polls suggest whites are more likely than blacks to say America is ready for a black president, which may be part of why much of the African-American community is cool to the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted December 5-7, 2006, found that 65 percent of whites thought America was ready, compared with 54 percent of blacks. The poll's margin of error was plus-or-minus 5 percentage points....

Among blacks, Obama's chief rival for the Democrat's 2008 presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, polls 15 to 20 points better than Obama and benefits from name recognition and deep Clinton roots in the black community.

Obama suffers, in part, because voters are not familiar with him and there is doubt whether the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, who was raised in Hawaii and educated in elite schools, can relate to the black American experience.

And now the first article:

The opening stages of the campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination have produced a noticeable shift in sentiment among African American voters, who little more than a month ago heavily supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton but now favor the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama.

Clinton, of New York, continues to lead Obama and other rivals in the Democratic contest, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. But her once-sizable margin over the freshman senator from Illinois was sliced in half during the past month largely because of Obama's growing support among black voters....

Clinton's and Obama's support among white voters changed little since December, but the shifts among black Democrats were dramatic. In December and January Post-ABC News polls, Clinton led Obama among African Americans by 60 percent to 20 percent. In the new poll, Obama held a narrow advantage among blacks, 44 percent to 33 percent. The shift came despite four in five blacks having a favorable impression of the New York senator.

African Americans view Clinton even more positively than they see Obama, but in the time since he began his campaign, his favorability rating rose significantly among blacks. In the latest poll, 70 percent of African Americans said they had a favorable impression of Obama, compared with 54 percent in December and January.

Two points about this.

First, it's a beautiful example of how news can be misleading even when the facts are perfectly accurate. I'm not saying either of these stories is misleading--well, I will, sort of, in a moment--but they do take different pieces of the puzzle and produce effectively opposite impressions. News reporting in this country is, for the most part, factually accurate; it's the angle you have to watch out for.

Second, the 'cool to Obama' story is based on the unspoken assumption that African-Americans would be expected to automatically vote for [insert name of African-American candidate here]. The man-bites-dog part of the story is that they aren't conforming to that assumption. Unspoken, the assumption can never be tested; brought to light, it can: African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Jesse Jackson; Al Sharpton, not so much; Shirley Chisholm and Carol Mosely-Braun, even less so. So the fact that the best-known white candidate in the field, wife of a president who got overwhelming support from African-Americans, polls better than an African-American candidate relatively new to politics--not a huge story.

Nor is it a timely story. The WaPo piece tracks the trend rather than a supposedly static situation, and it looks like the (pretty significant) movement reflected there is in the process of making the other story moot. It looks to me like the writers of the USA Today [edit: CNN, not USA Today] article 'knew' what their story was, and as a result missed the real story.