Afghan media and the presidential electoral campaign

An interesting article on the electoral campaign in Afghanistan with elections set for August 20. The focus is on the media campaign of candidates and the main point is that Afghan state television is biased in favor of Karzai, in terms of coverage time and interpretation.
The fact that Karzai is shown favorably by the media and that he has the funds to build a good advertising campaign obviously favors him, but smaller candidates are hurt and less able to attract coverage of their activities.

An excerpt:

"Covering Karzai's daily routine takes up a lot of air time and column inches. According to Tawhidi [the head of Afghanistan's Media Commission], during the first two weeks of monitoring, Karzai was on the TV news 55 times; his closest rival, Abdullah Abdullah, was a distant second with 13 appearances. Ashraf Ghani, the only other challenger given a chance in the poll, enjoyed a mere six airings.

In print media, the story was similar. Monitors found that state newspapers devoted twice as much space to Karzai during the monitoring period as to Abdullah and about ten times as much as Ashraf Ghani got."