Liberal writers are zeroing in on a new study from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism that found Barack Obama has been subjected to far more “negative” coverage than any of the Republican presidential candidates. The graphic accompanying the study is dramatic:
Slam dunk, right?
One of Eric Boehlert’s blog items at Media Matters is headlined “So Much for the Liberal Media.” In another post he acknowledges that there have been criticisms of the Pew methodology in the past, but the real issue here is how right-wing critics will react to the numbers.
Steve Benen at Washington Monthly makes a similar point:
It’s simply taken as a given in Republican circles that President Obama enjoys favorable coverage from major media outlets. This is generally pretty hard to believe among non-conservatives, but it’s helpful to take this out of the realm of perception and into more quantifiable analysis.
If the point that liberals are making is that the liberal media conspiracy that exists in the minds of conservatives bears no resemblance to reality, they’re right. But we didn’t need a new study to confirm this.
A more important question (for media critics at least) is whether the study’s methodology is sound. And this is where things get a little muddy.
Part of the Pew study is attempting to measure “tone.” This involves making some decisions about how you would measure that, as the study makes clear: “The unit of measure of tone is each assertion or statement contained in a story or blog post.” Pew set up a computer algorithm to capture news content and code it accordingly.
The report gives an example of a Gannett story about Herman Cain’s poll numbers. The report stated that he was making “good impressions,” according to the poll’s findings. Thus this would be coded as a “positive” assertion. A story that quoted someone speaking about Michele Bachmann’s migraines is a “negative” assertion. The report explained, “A story that is entirely about a poll showing Mitt Romney ahead of the Republican field—and that his lead is growing, would be a good example to put in the ‘positive’ category.”
It doesn’t take long to spot the problem here. Candidates performing well are far more likely to rack up “positive” coverage, even if that coverage is, strictly speaking, unremarkable campaign reporting about fundraising, polls and so on. Newt Gingrich’s campaign scores a lot of “negative” coverage. But given the state of his campaign, that is completely unsurprising—and does not reveal a media “bias” against Gingrich.
This would seem to be the main explanation for “negative” coverage of Obama. A number of Republican politicians are running to challenge him, and are thus likely to criticize his record. Those comments would be recorded as “negative” coverage. But so would coverage that simply relates bad news—Pew explains:
Even the week of May 2–8, immediately after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Obama’s coverage was overwhelmingly negative. One reason is that many of the references to his role in the hunt for bin Laden were matched by skepticism that he would receive any long-term political benefit from it. Another was that the bin Laden news was tempered with news about the nation’s economy.
“A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the streets to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decade-long manhunt,” stated a May 2 AP story. “The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his re-election campaign.”
They don’t make it perfectly clear, but one can assume that a story like this would be coded as “negative”—because it mentions things like unemployment and partisanship.
The problem is that a study like this seems to confuse media bias with bad news. It’s doubtful that Pew’s point was to suggest that there is an overwhelming anti-Obama bias in the national media. But that’s one conclusion people are likely to draw when a study talks about “positive” and “negative” media coverage.
It’s hard to suggest with a straight face that politicians deserve coverage that is half friendly, half critical at all times. But without some non-arbitrary way to determine the tone of coverage a politician should be getting—and what would that look like, exactly?—it’s hard to turn a count of “positive” and “negative” coverage into a gauge of media bias.
Would that the “tone” of corpress coverage reflected the impact of politicians’ actions on the well-being of living things and the planet they inhabit.
If that were the case, it would have an extremely negative effect on the presence of the term “positive”, wouldn’t it?
I wonder how much of the negative comments towards Obama reflect the fact that he’s the President in turbulent times, and frankly, though I voted for him, he really has done a pretty poor job. He hasn’t exactly been the second coming of FDR.
For the first time since I was old enough to vote, I’ve decided not to waste my vote on a Democratic President. I’ll vote Green this year. I haven’t contributed money or time to a Democratic campaign, this time, either. The Democratic Party truly deserves our scorn. The degree that they’ve taken their base for granted is too much for me to take anymore. It’s time for progressives to boycott non-Progressive Democrats and teach them that their abandonment of the progressives has consequences that are too large to ignore.
I still support progressives like Bernie Sanders, Al Franken and Keith Ellison, but that’s all.
Jeff Thompson, the google is free. Learn to use it.
Obama accomplishments:
– Health Reform â┚¬“ tried, attempted and failed, finally passed after 30 years.
– The Stimulus Bill which pulled this country from the brink of collapse.
– Pumped 150 billion into infrastructure & transpiration system, largest reinvestment in America’s infrastructure since Ike.
– Nation’s Energy Bill- $60 billion in renewable and clean energy investments, included investments in science and tech, amping up the budgets at NASA, the National Science Federation and an experimental energy agency that was created under George W.Bush but never funded until now.
– Expanded state kids health insurance act to cover 4 million uninsured kids.
– Signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act which is equal pay for equal work for women in the workforce.
– Nuclear Arms Deal with Russia which will reduce both nations’ nuclear arms by a third.
– He created a new Global Nonproliferation Initiate to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
– He set forth a new way forward on that radical right wing proposition of Ronald Reagan’s… A world without nuclear weapons.
– He broke new legislative ground with:
– The Hate Crimes Prevention law or the Matthew Sheppard Act, which languished in Congress for years.
– He lifted the Bush Administrations on Stem Cell Research lifting the limits on funding for embryonic stem-cell research, directing that “scientific integrity” be restored to government decision-making.
– He ended the Global Gag rule and resumed funding to UNFPA which works collaboratively to reduce poverty, improve health of women and children, prevents HIV/AIDS and provided family planning and assistance to women in 154 countries.
– The Food and Drug Administration, for the first time will be able to regulate Cigarettes and Tobacco Products.
– Dismantled the horrifically corrupt MMS or Minerals Management Service, broke it into three parts and removed the oversight function from that part of the department that is responsible for collecting $$ from oil leases, and now MMS will actually investigate the Oil industry instead of schtupping and snorting coke off microwaves with them, like they did during the Bush Administration.
– He overhauled the astonishing stupidity of the student loan system, so that banks are now no longer subsidized by the government for lending governmental guaranteed money to students.
– He cancelled a bloated F22 weapons program that was wasteful, irrelevant, unnecessary and totally overblown, spending the money instead on better body armor and protections for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Media that depends on corporate ads will not be liberal or progressive.
You’d think for example that NPR , without ads would be more progressive? No.
NPR is not liberal. There is not a time when they go against corporate interests. As an independent musician, artist, writer, filmmaker, zinester, and independent media source; I know that NPR will not talk about any aspect of corporate control of the arts and media, or those advocates against corporate control, or any of the artists opposed to corporate control.
It’s corporations that ultimately control NPR content. This is easy to refute. Find the anti corporate news on NPR. Good luck. The paradigm is shifting from conservative versus liberal to corporations versus democracy.
@Jeff Thompson: “It’s time for progressives to boycott non-Progressive Democrats and teach them that their abandonment of the progressives has consequences that are too large to ignore.”
Even if those “consequences” mean that a GOP candidate wins? Because that is what will surely happen if we don’t vote Democrat. I understand your frustration with the Democratic party (I am sorely disappointed in them, as well), but you have to know that a vote for the Green party is really a vote for the GOP. It sucks, but it’s the unfortunate political reality in which we live.
Voting for a 3rd party or staying home are the two most foolish and self defeating things a Democrat – progressive, moderate, liberal- can do. Do you want to see 2010 all over again. A move like this will turn the whole nation into WI.
i made the mistake of voting for nader in 2000 because the polls had led me to believe that ohio was out of gore’s reach…..turned out nader’s 3.5% of the vote was bush’s margin of victory. ohio’s 20 ec votes would have made florida unnecessary….never again
Why the right continue to complain that the media are slanted against them is beyond me. While Americans of all political parties believe that economic growth is a more pressing concern than deficit reduction and that Social Security and Medicare should be touched only after taxes are raised on the rich and Pentagon spending cut, the media highlight deficits as the the most important issue and rarely, until recently, focus on Pentagon waste or tax equity matters. Commentators who see SS and Medicare spending as major problems are given diproportionate attention, not a surprising fact since the communications moguls fill the airwaves with right -wing talk from Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and others who toe the corporate line, sometimes parroting the same phrases and code words on any given day. While the likes of Coulter, Limbaugh, and Beck have appeared on covers of national magazines over 10 times, serious Leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky are strangely hidden in the US, where American Chomsky has far less name recognition than in Europe or the Middle East. What we really have is moderately conservative, pro-corporate media, which many rabid conservatives cannot accept as good enough because they want to dominate everything, everywhere, all the time.
The right complains about the “liberal” media because it serves their political purposes. It has had the effect of intimidating most of the media, especially CNN and New York Times, such that they include an over-abundance of right wing talkers, while the right wing Fox “news” is virtually exclusively putting out right wing talking points.
I have very right wing friends and relatives. The belief in a liberal bias in the corporate media means they discount anything they happen to hear there which disagrees with their pre-conceived notions. As on person said to me, “Fox news provides reports that you don’t find in the other media.” I was tempted to say, “Have you considered that might be because what Fox is reporting is untrue?” I did not as I did not want to rupture family ties.
“Why the right continues to complain that the media are slanted against them is beyond me. ”
it’s known as “working the refs,” john
That chart is now.Now as in currant.Im amazed he has ANY positives at all.Gumby could glean more positives Id wager based on the job he9Obama)has done.During his run nothing stuck.Just wait until the republican is picked.Then Obama will sling mud with both hands chicago style.The press will join in.What a load of bull