Media coverage of the presidential race has not always been glowing for Barack Obama, but it has clearly been negative for John McCain, according to a survey of newspaper, Internet and television news since the political conventions.
Slightly fewer than a third of the stories about Obama were negative, whereas more than a third were positive and about the same number were neutral or mixed. More than half of the stories about McCain cast him in a negative light, whereas fewer than 2 in 10 were positive, according to Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The media watchdog group assessed the tone of the campaign coverage during the six crucial weeks from early September through the final presidential debate, examining 857 stories from 43 news outlets.
Although the authors acknowledged some observers would use the findings to argue that the major media have a pro-Obama bias, they said their data did not provide conclusive answers. They noted that coverage of Republicans and Democrats in this and other recent presidential elections seemed to have more to do with their success than with their party affiliation.
The group's research in 2000, for example, found that Democrat Al Gore got a level of negative coverage almost identical to the level Republican McCain is now receiving. Coverage of then-Gov. George W. Bush that year was more positive than Gore's, but more negative than Obama's has been this time.
The findings present "a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat winning coverage," the Washington-based group found. "Obama's coverage was negative in tone when he was dropping in the polls, and became positive when he began to rise, and it was just so for McCain."
(The entire study is available at www.journalism.org.)
The Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, saw her media coverage shift from largely positive to largely negative over the six-week period, as reporters increasingly probed her record and examined her sometimes bumpy television interviews.
About 2 in 5 of the stories about the Alaska governor had a negative tone, whereas fewer than a third were positive and a third were neutral or mixed, the study found.
The findings seemed to debunk Palin backers' assertions that her negative coverage focused on personal and family issues: Only 5% of stories were aimed at those topics.
