"JimH" wrote in message
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"NOYB" wrote in message
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Study Shows U.S. Election Coverage Harder on Bush


Mar 14, 10:01 AM (ET)


By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. media coverage of last year's election was
three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than
Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.

The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories
about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a
Massachusetts senator.

Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of
stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the
Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The study looked at 16 newspapers of varying size across the country,
four nightly newscasts, three network morning news shows, nine cable
programs and nine Web sites through the course of 2004.

Examining the public perception that coverage of the war in Iraq was
decidedly negative, it found evidence did not support that conclusion.
The majority of stories had no decided tone, 25 percent were negative and
20 percent were positive, it said.

The three network nightly newscasts and public broadcaster PBS tended to
be more negative than positive, while Fox News was twice as likely to be
positive as negative.

Looking at public perceptions of the media, the report showed that more
people thought the media was unfair to both Kerry and Bush than to the
candidates four years earlier, but fewer people thought news
organizations had too much influence on the outcome of the election.

"It may be that the expectations of the press have sunk enough that they
will not sink much further. People are not dismayed by disappointments in
the press. They expect them," the authors of the report said.

The study noted a huge rise in audiences for Internet news, particularly
for bloggers whose readers jumped by 58 percent in six months to 32
million people.

Despite the growing importance of the Web, the report said investment was
not keeping pace and some 62 percent of Internet professionals reported
cutbacks in the newsroom in the last three years, even more than the 37
percent of print, radio and TV journalists who cited cutbacks in their
newsrooms.

"For all that the number of outlets has grown, the number of people
engaged in collecting original information has not," the report said,
noting that much of the investment was directed at repackaging and
presenting information rather than gathering news.



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Three to one more negative against a Republican? Hell, that's probably
an improvement from prior years.





Nice article. An article by an AP television writer reported Fox as more
biased than CNN and CNBC because they reported more positive news than
negative news. Go figure.

========================================

" NEW YORK -- A study of news coverage of the war in Iraq fails to support
a conclusion that events were portrayed either negatively or positively
most of the time.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism

That's the same group (from Columbia University) which reached the
conclusion that the media coverage was harder on Bush!