* Will Caskey has an insightful post about “earned” vs. “paid” media. He doesn’t think much about media coverage of campaigns and uses the Cook County Assessor’s race between Joe Berrios and Forrest Claypool as an example…

Now it would not be accurate to say the Chicago press does not like Berrios very much, because it doesn’t really do justice to their intense, singular hatred of the man. They were really, really [angry] that Berrios was running for anything at all and super duper jazzed that he had a credible, well-funded challenger. The details are mundane and boring, as details tend to be. Suffice to say Berrios for Assessor did not face a very pleasant earned media environment. […]

Going into election day if there was one thing any remotely interested Chicago pundit agreed on it was that we [the Berrios campaign] were toast, gone, finished.

Except that didn’t happen. We won, and not by a little. And of course, this is just an anecdote, and the jokes write themselves about the two-party system or Chicago-style politics, but that doesn’t change the facts: The narrative was downright apocalyptic, and it didn’t change the election. It didn’t even make it close. Because newspapers don’t vote, and actual people who do vote don’t make up their minds based on what some goof on tv says will happen. That’s just another version of crying about press bias.

The truth is that from a campaign perspective the press is just earned media, and you get what you pay for.

If you get your preferred, poll-tested message into print, great! Whatever else that’s said on top of that is a distraction. If it’s flatly impossible to get your message into earned media, c’est la vie; buy more paid media and move on.

For the most part, he’s right.

Media coverage can have an impact on very close races. The Tribune’s endorsement of the hapless Andy McKenna in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary probably cost Sen. Kirk Dillard the 200 or so votes he needed to beat Sen. Bill Brady. But there were other reasons for Dillard’s loss.

What reporters cannot usually do is elect a candidate against long odds, or even impact a race separated by more than a point or so.

There are caveats, of course. Sometimes, big revelations are reported by the media which sink candidates. But, usually, the other side has to put those revelations into TV/radio ads and/or direct mail and robocalls to burn that message in. So, even then, earned media is only part of the game. Moving real numbers is almost always accomplished via advertising. [Adding: Earned media is important, however, to paid media attacks or praise because it adds a level of authority to the attacks/praise.]

Just something to keep in mind.