From the Pew Research Center:
The most striking difference in Obama’s media narrative is the degree to which he has enjoyed considerably more positive press than either of his predecessors at the beginning of their first terms.
Overall, positive stories outnumbered negative ones by better than two-to-one (42% to 20%). Another 38% were neutral or mixed.
For both President Bush and President Clinton, by contrast, the bulk of the coverage was neutral, and negative coverage slightly outweighed positive.
Uh, haven’t I been saying this for months?
Yep, ‘ole Pres Obama has the media eating out of his hands, and the foolish media elite think highly of themselves as they eat Obama’s table scraps.
Obama cannot say more than two words in public without his teleprompters supplying words that someone else wrote. Yet the media swoon over his as “eloquent” and “memorizing”.
There are significant variations in how the different media sectors have covered the Obama presidency. Newspapers and evening network television were most positive in their treatment of Obama. Online news sites were more neutral. Within the cable news universe, MSNBC and Fox News offered strikingly different portrayals of the young presidency, while CNN more closely reflected the tone of the media overall. Meanwhile, NPR and PBS offered the highest percentage of neutral stories of any outlets studied.
Newspapers and evening network television have been in the tank for Obama since he announced his candidacy. They love him because that -want- to love him, they -need- to love him. It’s much like a 14-year-old girl and her favorite rock star.
The topics covered have also has been different for Obama versus his predecessors. Roughly twice as much of the coverage of Obama (44%) has concerned his personal and leadership qualities than was the case for Bush (22%) or Clinton (26%). Less of the coverage, meanwhile, has focused on his policy agenda.
The media doesn’t care what Obama does while in office, they only care that he’s alive and breathing. Isn’t this a type of emotional illness?
Fully 40% of news stories were positive while just 17% were negative. In op eds and editorials, the numbers have been fairly similar (43% positive vs. 27% negative). Newsweek stood out even more. More than half of its stories have carried a clearly positive tone for the President, 53% vs. 23% negative.
Oh geez, Newsweek absolutely hated Bush, while they’ve been panting over Obama for months.
And yet the Soccer Mom wearing her “Yes We Can” t-shirt exclaims there is no bias in the media.
But there may be hope for the future:
In directly comparing Obama’s coverage to his two predecessors’, PEJ used the same sample—Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS nightly newscasts—for all three presidents. But to get a fuller sense of how the new administration was covered and reflect the more diverse media landscape today, we also broadened Obama’s news universe to include 49 media outlets in five sectors—online, newspaper, radio, broadcast news and cable news.
What is noteworthy in the expanded media universe are some significant differences in how various sectors and outlets covered the early months of the Obama tenure.
One broad trend finds that the tone of Obama’s coverage was more favorable in two traditional “old media” sectors—newspapers and network news—than in two newer platforms, cable news and online.
The two traditional “old media” sectors – newspapers and network news – are also the ones losing viewers in record numbers, with many going bankrupt. Maybe some of the viewers are picking up on the fact they they’re seeing Opinion dressed up to look like News, and they’re getting tired of it. You can only eat so much propaganda before you become ill.
Obama, media, Newspaper, evening network television, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, PBS, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS
