New endorsements from major news organizations, polls on election updates, and polls on media takes of the election are out this week. Do they impact decisions? I suppose we will never know but they are presented to you here for your information.

New York Times endorses Obama for president
“NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for U.S. president on Thursday, saying he had “met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change.” The Times posted its endorsement on its Internet site on Thursday evening and was to publish it in Friday editions of the newspaper. ”

Polls: new on out today. From Reuters:
“Democrat Barack Obama holds a 10-point lead over Republican rival John McCain in the U.S. presidential race, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Friday.
Obama leads McCain by 51 percent to 41 percent among likely U.S. voters in the three-day tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points. Obama had a 12-point lead on Thursday.
The numbers marked the end of a 4-day slide for McCain, who has seen Obama’s lead widen in national surveys as well as polls in many of the battleground states that will decide the November 4 election.
But pollster John Zogby said the strength of Obama’s support — which has grown amid increasingly dismal economic news — remained impressive.
“McCain stopped the bleeding a little bit but he still has a long way to go,” he said.”

Pew Institute Poll of voters related to the media (not surprised and did a blog on media bias sometime ago)

From Pew

“The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.

Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable — and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three-to-one — the most unfavorable of all four candidates — according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six-in-ten stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two-in-ten (14%) were positive. “