The Project for Excellence in Journalism, affiliated with the Pew Research Center, has produced a highly illuminating study on bias in the media. They teamed up with Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy to objectively analyze campaign media coverage in America this year.
Democrats got much more positive coverage in the daily papers examined than they did elsewhere. Fully 59% of all stories about Democrats had a clear, positive message vs. 11% that carried a negative tone. That is roughly double the percentage of positive stories that was found in the media generally. Just under a third (30%) of the front page stories examined were neutral.
For the top tier Democrats, the positive tilt was even more the case than for Democrats in general. Obama’s front page coverage in the sample was 70% positive and 9% negative and Clinton’s was similarly 61% positive and 13% negative.
Republican candidates, in contrast, were more likely to receive clearly negative stories in print than elsewhere: 40% negative vs. 26% positive and 34% neutral.
Once, the evening network newscasts may have been the single most important media target for someone aspiring to the presidency. Even now, with 20 million viewers, a median audience age of roughly 60 years (a solid voting group) and an audience demographic that mirrors the population generally across party and ideology, the network evening newscasts are still an important venue.
Network evening news closely reflected the overall media when it came to dividing time between Democrat and Republican candidates (49% vs. 28%). While all three produced more stories about Democrats than Republicans, at the NBC Evening News the gap was smaller—just an 11 percentage point difference (41% Democrats vs. 30% Republicans) vs. roughly a 30 percentage point gap at ABC and CBS.
The tone of coverage in the 30-minute evening newscasts was much more positive toward the Democrats than Republicans. And again, among the major candidates, Obama got the best of it and McCain the worst. Of the 11 stories primarily about McCain that ran on the nightly news in the first five months of the year, not a single one carried a clearly positive tone. Six of them were clearly negative and five were neutral.
Is anyone really surprised? Is it even possible to trust the mainstream media any more?
Pew Research Center, Democrat, Republican
