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speechlesstx · Oct 31, 2007, 10:01 AM

A new study "released Monday from the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, found newspapers and broadcast TV outlets devoted far more time to covering the Democratic candidates than the Republicans and that the tone of those stories was much more favorable to the Democrats, mirroring the results of a Media Research Center study released in August."

Another distinguishing characteristic of the print stories studied was tone. 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 we 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.

Newspapers also stood out for initiating more campaign coverage on their own. Nearly half of all front page stories were triggered by newsroom initiative rather than reacting to what the candidate or others said or did (46%). That is substantially higher than the 28% in the media generally in the sample. A little more than a third of stories were triggered by the candidates and their campaigns (37%), compared with 46% generally.

On broadcast television:

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.

The commercial over-the-air TV networks did not focus on second tier candidates at all, except for Bill Richardson when he announced (and Joe Biden when he made controversial comments about Obama). PBS was the only network in which any other 2nd tier candidates was successful as a newsmaker.

On cable:

CNN: The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain fairing the worst (63% negative) and Romney fairing a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral.

It’s not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half of the Illinois Senator’s stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama.

MSNBC: On MSNBC, a positive tone pervaded coverage of candidates from both parties. Nearly half (47%) of the stories about Democratic candidates were positive, vs. 19% negative and 34% neutral. Coverage of Republican candidates was not quite as rosy but still more stories were positive (38%) than neutral (33%) or negative (30%).

But here as well, Senator McCain still came up short. Four-in-ten of his stories (39%) were negative in tone compared to only about two-in-ten (22%) that were positive.

And this one especially for the Fox News haters:

Fox News: The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).

When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.

Talk radio results were no surprise but both the NBC and MSNBC results were a little surprising to me. Overall, it's clear the media is favoring Democrats so Paul Krugman and everyone else outraged over the overwhelmingly "right-wing media" in this country are obviously deluded.

What wasn't surprising to me is the data did not show Fox News to be an arm of the Republican party. Does that surprise you, or was this study rigged?

tomder55 · Oct 31, 2007, 10:47 AM

The Dems are more news worthy . We have the scary prospects of Evita becoming the Prez. They have the 1st good looking intelligent good mannered black man running (don't recall Biden's exact words) . We have a candidate who has seen UFOs . I can't tell when watching their debates if I am witnessing a political process or the next award winning reality TV show . Much more entertaining than the Republicans soberly discussing the serious issues of our times.

speechlesstx · Oct 31, 2007, 10:54 AM

Originally Posted by tomder55

The Dems are more news worthy . We have the scary prospects of Evita becoming the Prez. They have the 1st good looking intelligent good mannered black man running (don't recall Biden's exact words) . We have a candidate who has seen UFOs . I can't tell when watching their debates if I am witnessing a political process or the next award winning reality tv show . Much more entertaining than the Republicans soberly discussing the serious issues of our times.

I believe it was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

I just caught a glimpse of Kucinich's UFO story, I kind of imagine his wife has seen her share, too. :D

tomder55 · Oct 31, 2007, 11:04 AM

I'm sure