Map of Newspaper Endorsements in the 2008 US Presidential Election

Blog Post for this over here. Updated on Thursday, 2008 Nov 13.
Screenshots: map - big · med · sm | bar graph

See also: our «Red/Blue split vs. Rural/Urban split» graph

Apart from the unsurprising evidence that (choose one: [[Obama is the overwhelming choice]] -OR- [[there is overwhelming liberal media bias]]), I'm struck by the mismatch between papers' endorsements and their "Red State" vs "Blue State" alignment.

• I think the amount of red in the blue states is a market effect. If you're the Boston Herald, there's no percentage in agreeing with the Boston Globe; similarly The Daily News vs New York Post, SF Examiner vs SF Chronicle &c. (One reason the Tribune endorsement, even accounting for hometown bias, is so striking.) I don't mean that one or the other alignment is wrong, or chosen cynically -- simply that in a market supporting multiple papers, readers and journalists are efficiently sorted into two separate camps.
• The amount of blue in the red states highlights how foolishly incomplete the "Red State/Blue State" model is for anything but electoral college returns. The largest part of the Red/Blue split is Rural/Urban. Consider the electoral cartogram for the last election. Almost every city is blue, even in the south and mountain, while almost all rural areal is red, even in California and Massachusetts. The urban exceptions on the cartogram -- chiefly Dallas, Houston and Boise -- stand noticeably alone on the endorsement map as having red unpaired with blue. (in this election even the Houston Chronicle is endorsing Obama, but they are quite traditionally Republican.)

This seems to speak of why so many on the right feel there's a MSM bias. Roughly 50% of the country lives in a top-50 metro area (metros of over a million people: like Salt Lake City or Raleigh, NC and on up), 50% live outside (in rural areas, or in cities like Fresno, CA and Allentown/Bethlehem, PA or smaller). But our major newspapers are located almost exclusively in urban areas.

Thus, surprisingly, the major right-leaning papers are located in parts of the country we consider highly leftish: the largest urban areas are both «the most liberal» and «the most likely to support a sizeable conservative target audience».