Cheat Seeking Missiles

Study Finds The Obvious: Pro-Obama Media Bias

Posted by: Laer at 12:27 pm

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism just completed a comprehensive study of recent campaign coverage which failed to turn up excellence in journalism; rather, it found strongly negative coverage of McCain vs. much more positive coverage of Obama.

Pew researchers analyzed 2,412 campaign stories from 48 news outlets that covered the six weeks from the end of the conventions through the final presidential debate. They focused on 857 stories from 43 outlets that were focused on one of the candidates in order to determine the “tone” of articles. They found:

In other words, there were nearly twice as many negatively toned McCain stories, and about a third less positively toned McCain stories. How does this play with the electorate? I think Pew found the answer in its analysis of the coverage of Sarah Palin, which was triple the amount of coverage Joe Biden received:

As for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, her coverage had an up and down trajectory, moving from quite positive, to very negative, to more mixed.

Translated: In the afterglow of the very good speech she gave at the convention, when she was immune from negative media coverage because people had just formed their own opinion of her, she was up. What could the media do? They had to report on the good speech and the positive reaction of the GOP faithful and others. They had to report on the boost she gave the ticket.

Then the media focused on the negative: Troopergate, Wasilla whiners and feminist rants, and they fed us a steady drivel of negative stories, as Pew found. But as she persevered and powered through these negative stories, and her popularity rebounded (among those not suffering from PDS), the tone of the press coverage had nowhere to go but up.

Pew found that in all, 39% of Palin stories carried a negative tone, while 28% were positive and 33% were neutral - which is really unconscionable. I would love to see a comparison to Geraldine Ferraro’s coverage!

Tone is of course related to the nature of the news item; it’s tough, for example, to put a bubbly tone on a story about the teacher busted for child molesting. Obama’s lead in the polls and command of fund-raising can be expected to give him a “tone edge” - but not a two-fold or three-fold tone edge.

Pew says it cannot prove bias:

Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions.

But here’s the key. Pew notes that Obama’s positive coverage tracks with polls; down when he was down, up thereafter, in a wholly objective news analysis. But McCain’s negatives started growing with his reaction to the financial crisis - a subjective news analysis. It is an easy task, and not a dishonest one, to catergorize McCain’s reaction to the financial crisis as successful, primarily because he was able to work with the House GOP when others couldn’t. But the press overwhelmingly, and subjectively, saw it as a negative - an anti-McCain bias that drove down his positives.

In short, with a hat-tip to Matt Davies: