In Final Week Romney Coverage Increasingly Negative, MSNBC Had Zero Favorable Romney Stories

by Warner Todd Huston | November 23, 2012 2:28 pm

According to the latest study[1] of the last week of the media’s coverage of the 2012 presidential election, Romney’s coverage turned increasingly negative. The worst example was that of MSNBC which didn’t have any positive stories about Romney’s campaign, not a single one.

The study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, showed[2] that MSNBC had zero positive stories about Romney while its Obama coverage skewed 51% positive for the President.

Fox News also increased its negative coverage, for Obama in that case, but its coverage was not nearly so negative against Obama as MSNBC’s was against Romney. The study found that Fox News gave only 5 percent of its coverage to positive Obama stories (with 56 percent negative) while the cable network gave Romney 42 percent positive coverage (with 11 percent negative).

With all news coverage tabulated, Romney’s coverage got more negative in the final week with 33 percent of his coverage skewing negative and only 16 percent positive. In contrast, Obama got 29 percent positive coverage with 19 percent negative.

“For Mitt Romney in the final week, the tone of coverage remained largely unchanged from the previous two weeks. Negative stories in the press outnumbered positive ones 33 percent to 16 percent,” Pew reported.

But Romney may have suffered in final days from the press focusing less on him relative to his opponent. After receiving roughly identical levels of coverage for most of October, in the last week of campaigning Obama was a significant presence in eight out of 10 campaign stories compared with six in 10 for Romney-one of the biggest disparities in any week after Labor Day.

Interestingly, Pew found that Twitter actually increased in positivity for Mitt Romney in the final weeks of the campaign while Facebook’s balance didn’t much change in the final weeks. The blogs, however, saw an upsurge in positive coverage of Obama.

Another interesting find was that Obama got no clear bounce in media coverage after that third debate even though so many pundits said Obama had redeemed himself with it. The study also found that Obama got better positive coverage after his party convention than Romney got from the Republican convention.

Don’t tell me the Old Media isn’t biased.

Endnotes:
  1. latest study: http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/final_days_media_campaign_2012
  2. showed: http://www.businessinsider.com/msnbc-bias-romney-obama-liberal-news-media-2012-11

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