By: Barry Soper | Tuesday, November 27, 2012 6:00 AM

If there's one thing that old warhorse Muldoon used to have disdain for it was what he called Ivory Tower academics and their sugar coated theories that could be made to fit any scenario.

He wondered why so much money was wasted on their full, frank and meaningless findings. And he had a point.

They're still doing it. Take the Massey University's in depth survey of newspaper political coverage in the leadup to the last election.

They found that four of our biggest dailies were essentially biased in favour of State Homie John Key. This in depth research flicked through and daily and Sunday rags and counted the number of pictures taken of both Key and the frothing Phil Goff.

And shock, horror, probe, although in academic terms it'd be analysis, meetings and findings, but whatever, Key had his photo appear 138 times while poor old unphotogenic Goff managed to get his mug in print on just 80 occasions which led to the academic finding that the bias was in favour of Key. The pontificating professor reckons Goff had real grounds to feel unfairly treated.

Yeah but think about the pics that dominated during the campaign. The very public, private cuppa tea didn't do Key any favours and neither was it of any benefit to Banksie. The only one smiling into his ever present mirror on that one was Luigi Peters.

And what about the photo of the frothing Phil wandering around the beach in his suit in Tauranga picking up globs of oil and at the same time insulting those who'd spent hours really doing the job of cleaning up after the grounding of the container ship.

What this in depth academic analysis of campaign coverage seems to forget that Key was the Prime Minister and when there's a disaster like an oil spill, campaign or no campaign, he tends to get the most coverage, even if it is standing at a podium assuring the great unwashed that the environment is the number one concern.

You only have to look at the recent American Presidential election when the Sandy storm struck, cash strapped Obama retired to the White House to do the job he wanted to keep while Romney simply looked on in envy.

So on this piece of professorial puffery Muldoon was right!