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Saturday, November 24, 2012

New Report on How The Press Helped Obama win

Bias: It's hard to see how press coverage of President Obama's re-election bid could have gotten any more biased, but a new report shows the media managed to outdo themselves the week before voters went to the polls.

The Pew Research Center's latest analysis puts hard numbers against the claim that the press went out of its way to get Obama re-elected.

According to the report, after months of positive press, "Obama's coverage improved dramatically" in the crucial final week of the campaign.

In fact, 29% of the stories about Obama that week were positive and just 19% were negative. At the same time, a third of the stories about Mitt Romney were negative, and just 16% were positive.

When it comes to bias, MSNBC is in a league of its own, Pew found. It ran zero negative stories about Obama and zero positive stories about Romney in that last week.

Not only did Obama's overall coverage improve dramatically, he got far more of it. Pew found that in the last week, 80% of campaign stories featured Obama, compared with 62% for Romney.
"Romney may have suffered in (the) final days from the press focusing less on him relative to his opponent," the researchers concluded. (Continues)

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