A survey from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that when it comes to covering politics, horse-race coverage remains king, and the network viewers watch take drastically different approaches to covering the candidates.
PEJ surveyed cable news segments between August 27 and October 21, and graded them based on the “tone” of the segment. They found that when it came to coverage of President Obama, a clear plurality of segments on Fox News were negative in tone, while a clear plurality of segments on MSNBC were positive. CNN was split almost down the middle. When it came to coverage of Mitt Romney, an overwhelming majority of segments on MSNBC were negative while a plurality on Fox News were positive. A plurality of CNN segments were also negative. You can read the entire report here.