The latest Duh! story:
Media coverage of John McCain has been heavily unfavorable since the political conventions, more than three times as negative as the portrayal of Barack Obama, a new study says.
Fifty-seven percent of the print and broadcast stories about the Republican nominee were decidedly negative, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today, while 14 percent were positive. The McCain campaign has repeatedly complained that the mainstream media are biased toward the senator from Illinois.
Obama's coverage was more balanced during the six-week period from Sept. 8 through last Thursday, with 36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative.
Gee, it's not like it was hard to notice the negative coverage of John McCain. Or that the negative coverage of McCain came, oddly, at a time that McCain had pulled ahead of Obama in many national polls. One important number missing from this analysis is the number of stories about each candidate. My bet would be that McCain received far more stories--and far more negative stories--about his campaign than Obama has since the conventions.
The Wall Street meltdown appears to have been a turning point for both candidates. Thirty-four percent of the stories about Obama's reaction to the crisis were positive, while 18 percent were negative. McCain's coverage, though, went into a free fall after he initially declared that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." By the following week, more than half the stories about McCain were negative and only 11 percent positive, just as Obama's coverage was turning positive by a margin of more than 5 to 1.
But don't worry. It's not that there's a bias or anything.
While some will seize on these findings as evidence that the media are pro-Obama, the study says they actually contain "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.
Yeah, I'm sure there isn't a "MSM perceiving Obama as a winner, so they give him more positive coverage" suggestion. Nah, that couldn't be it.
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