[lit-ideas] Study Shows U.S. Election Coverage Harder on Bush
- From: Brian <cabrian@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 14 May 2005 23:25:41 -0500
03/14/05 | 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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