A just-released PEJ study reveals what many of us already know about the TV news coverage of Election ’08 — but some of the findings may surprise you. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that MSNBC’s “more positive toward Democrats and more negative toward Republicans” tone “was not reflected in the coverage of its broadcast sibling, NBC News.”
Indeed, NBC’s coverage of [Gov. Sarah] Palin was the most positive of any TV organization studied, including Fox.
The PEJ also determined that ABC’s World News, the CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News “stood out for being more neutral-and also less negative-than most other news outlets.” But the morning shows were more negative:
44% of the morning show stories were clearly negative, compared with 34% on the nightly news and 42% in the press overall.
The not-so-surprising findings, after the jump…
• MSNBC stood out for having less negative coverage of Obama than the press generally (14% of stories vs. 29% in the press overall) and for having more negative stories about McCain (73% of its coverage vs. 57% in the press overall).
• On Fox, in contrast, coverage of Obama was more negative than the norm (40% of stories vs. 29% overall) and less positive (25% of stories vs. 36% generally). For McCain, the news channel was somewhat more positive (22% vs. 14% in the press overall) and substantially less negative (40% vs. 57% in the press overall). Yet even here, his negative stories outweighed positive ones by almost 2 to 1.
• CNN fell distinctly in the middle of the three cable channels when it came to tone. In general, the tone of its coverage was closer than any other cable news channel to the press overall, though also somewhat more negative overall.