Media Out-biases Blogs
by Rich Noyes
Issue 96 - November 21, 2007

According to a new study, the news organizations that hold themselves up as the most neutral and professional — big newspapers, the broadcast networks and taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio — are actually producing campaign stories that are the most tilted in favor of Democrats, while online news and talk radio have actually been the most balanced.

The 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.

The PEJ study looked at a wide array of media — broadcast and cable TV, liberal and conservative talk radio, public radio, newspapers and the Internet — but in most cases used sampling techniques to keep the number of stories to a manageable amount. For daytime cable TV, for example, the group looked at just a half-hour per day of CNN, MSNBC and Fox; for newspapers, the researchers only read stories that appeared on the front-page.

Nevertheless, the study — which looked at campaign coverage from January 1 through May 31 — offers additional evidence that the elite news media are tipping in favor of the Democrats, in both amount of coverage and the tone of coverage. According to the report, here’s how the researchers measured the tone of each campaign story:

While reading or listening to a story, coders tally up all the comments that have either a negative or positive tone to the reporting. Direct and indirect quotes are counted. In order for a story either positive or negative, it must have 1.5 times the amount of positive or negative comments (with an exception for 2 to 3, which is coded as neutral). If the headline or lead has a positive or negative tone, it should be counted twice into the total value. Also counted twice for tone are the first three paragraphs or first four sentences, whichever comes first.

Using that methodology, the researchers found that the news sources that hold themselves up as the most objective — newspapers, the three broadcast morning shows, the three broadcast network evening newscasts and NPR — were in fact the most tilted, all in favor of the Democrats. At the same time, cable news, commercial talk radio and online news were overall more balanced (with conservative and liberal talk radio basically canceling each other out).

Some news stories on this study have misleadingly charged that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has received mostly negative coverage, such as in the New York Post:

If there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Hillary Rodham Clinton is walloping Barack Obama — earning twice as many negative stories, according to a new media survey.

The former first lady has been the chief media obsession of the TV campaign, generating more coverage — good and bad — than any other candidate, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But to reach that conclusion, one must count conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity alongside supposedly objective news sources like ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times.

While the report does not detail the tone of Clinton’s by each media source, it does report that conservative talk radio accounted for “nearly 20%” of the 294 stories examined, and that “nearly nine-out-of-ten Clinton segments in conservative talk (86%) were clearly negative in tone.” Apply some arithmetic and the tone of Clinton’s coverage — without conservative talk radio — instantly becomes mostly favorable: roughly 33% positive, vs. 26% negative.

In other words, while Hillary may not be the darling of either liberal or conservative talk radio, the media elite are still showering her with lots of good press.

Rich Noyes is editor of NewsBusters.