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Media Bias
- Thread starter Archy1221
- Start date
Archy1221
Well-known member
Really think providers should ban Oliver Darcy from there services for being a completely moronic, lying, a$$ his entire media career.
Enhance
Administrator
You misunderstand. I'm talking about the coverage a news agency provides about a candidate and/or their policies, not equitable advertising opportunities afforded to candidates (i.e. Equal Time Rule).Born N Bled Red said:
For example, if some fringe or minor candidates don't have the financial backing and public support to mount a serious campaign in an Omaha mayoral election, newsrooms will at some point begin to scale back their coverage of said candidate's positions/campaigns/press releases in their news content.
Guy Chamberlin
Well-known member
Archy1221 said:
Yes. It's a very thorough and well-considered dive.
If you bothered to read it, you'd come away knowing that initial coverage of Obama was more negative, but became more positive as he rose in the polls. Initial coverage of McCain was more positive, but became more negative with his responses to the ongoing economic crisis. The negative stats you cite are almost entirely from the period from the conventions through the last debates, and reflect what Pew analysts call "horse race" metrics: positive and negative coverage linked to who is perceived as the front-runner and who is falling behind as cited by the polls, not opinions.
It looks like I was wrong about Sarah Palin tainting the coverage of McCain. According to this helpful link you provided, Sarah Palin enjoyed more positive media coverage than negative, and compiled far more positive coverage than Joe Biden, who was rarely covered at all.
Funny how you can read this kind of deep contextual dive and come away with "whopping difference." But I'm guessing your mind was already made up.
I was of course responding to your post about the press loving McCain until he ran for President, and then hating him. While you can't attach numbers to that, the anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise.
Archy1221
Well-known member
Archy1221
Well-known member
Obviously you didn’t read it because youR statement is untrue. Is that what they taught in Journalism 101?
“The findings suggest that, in the end, Palin’s portrayal in the press was not the major factor hurting McCain. Her coverage, while tilting negative, ”
“Coverage of Palin, in the end, was more negative than positive. In all, 39% of Palin stories carried a negative tone, while 28% were positive, ”
knapplc
Active member
Enhance said:
Here's what's really crazy, though - the media sat through five years of trump's bloviating, bullying and bashing and rarely, if ever, used direct words like "lie" or "liar" to describe him.
I suggest that not only has the media not been hard enough on trump, they coddled him, and bear significant blame for the situation we find ourselves in today.
Guy Chamberlin
Well-known member
They taught me to read the whole article, digest the context, and appreciate the conclusions drawn by the authors themselves. To my original point: initial press coverage of McCain, and it appears Palin, was generally positive until it became less so, driven by the candidate's actions and polling sentiment rather than media bias. See the boldfaced section for a handy summation that puts your bar graph and "whopping difference" comment in perspective.
Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments. In many ways, the arc of the media narrative during this phase of the 2008 general election might be best described as a drama in which John McCain has acted and Barack Obama has reacted.
As for Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, her coverage had an up and down trajectory, moving from quite positive, to very negative, to more mixed. What drove that tone toward a more unfavorable light was probing her public record and her encounters with the press. Little of her trouble came from coverage of her personal traits or family issues. In the end, she also received less than half the coverage of either presidential nominee, though about triple that of her vice presidential counterpart, Joe Biden.
The findings suggest that, in the end, Palin’s portrayal in the press was not the major factor hurting McCain. Her coverage, while tilting negative, was far more positive than her running mate’s.
These are some of the findings of the study, which examined 2,412 campaign stories from 48 news outlets, during six critical weeks of the general election phase from the end of the conventions through the final presidential debate. Tone was examined on a subset of this sample, 857 stories from 43 outlets, those campaign stories that were focused on one of the candidates. Marion Just of Wellesley College served as a consultant on the study. The Project is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Among the findings:
- Coverage of Obama began in the negative after the conventions, but the tone switched with the changing direction of the polls. The most positive stories about him were those that were most political—the ones focused on polling, the electoral map, and tactics.
- For McCain, coverage began positively, but turned sharply negative with McCain’s reaction to the crisis in the financial markets. As he took increasingly bolder steps to try and reverse the direction of the polls, the coverage only worsened. Attempts to turn the dialogue away from the economy through attacks on Obama’s character did hurt Obama’s media coverage, but McCain’s was even more negative.
- Coverage of Palin, in the end, was more negative than positive. In all, 39% of Palin stories carried a negative tone, while 28% were positive, and 33% were neutral. Contrary to what some suggested, little of the coverage was about Palin’s personal life (5%).
- Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden was nearly the invisible man. His had just one large moment, the vice presidential debate, which also offered his only positive or neutral contribution. Aside from that week, the limited coverage he did receive was far more negative than Palin’s, and nearly as negative as McCain’s.
- The economy was hardly a singular lens through which the media perceived the race. Though it was the No. 1 campaign topic overall, five out of the six weeks other topics were bigger, and in the end it accounted for not much more of the campaign newshole (18%) than assessments of the candidates in the four debates (17%).
- Horse race reporting, once again, made up the majority of coverage, but less so than earlier in the contest or than in previous elections. Since the conventions ended, 53% of the newshole studied has focused on political matters, particularly tactics, strategy and polling. That is more than twice as much as the coverage focused on policy (20%). This focus on tactics and horse race grew in the last three weeks as both campaigns became more negative in their rhetoric.
Tone is an elusive and yet unavoidable question when examining the role of the news media. Who got better coverage, and why?
To examine tone, the Project takes a particularly cautious and conservative approach. Unlike some researchers, we examine not just whether assertions in stories are positive or negative, but also whether they are inherently neutral. This, we believe, provides a much clearer and fairer sense of the tone of coverage than ignoring those balanced or mixed evaluations. Second, we do not simply tally up all the evaluative assertions in stories and compile them into a single pile to measure. Journalists and audiences think about press coverage in stories or segments. They ask themselves, is this story positive or negative or neutral? Hence the Project measures coverage by story, and for a story to be deemed as having a negative or positive tone, it must be clearly so, not a close call: for example, the negative assertions in a story must outweigh positive assertions by a margin of at least 1.5 to 1 for that story to be deemed negative.
One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions. Obama’s coverage was negative in tone when he was dropping in the polls, and became positive when he began to rise, and it was just so for McCain as well. Nor are these numbers different than what we have seen before. Obama’s numbers are similar to what we saw for John Kerry four years ago as he began rising in the polls, and McCain’s numbers are almost identical to what we saw eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore.
What the findings also reveal is the reinforcing—rather than press-generated—effects of media. We see a repeating pattern here in which the press first offers a stenographic account of candidate rhetoric and behavior, while also on the watch for misstatements and gaffes. Then, in a secondary reaction, it measures the political impact of what it has reported. This is magnified in particular during presidential races by the prevalence of polling and especially daily tracking. While this echo effect exists in all press coverage, it is far more intense in presidential elections, with the explosion of daily tracking polls, state polls, poll aggregation sites and the 24-hour cable debate over their implications. Even coverage of the candidate’s policy positions and rhetoric, our reading of these stories suggest, was tied to horse race and took on its cast.
Pagination
Archy1221
Well-known member
The 2016 election proves this statement as disingenuous and not accurate as the reason for positive or negative coverage. Same goes for the 2000 and 2004 coverage.
DevoHusker
New member
Since I have proven unable to master gif responses since the reconfiguration...please picture the Will Ferrell one, in Anchorman, saying "I don't believe you".
However, I also know you never post anything that you can't back up with a source or 2...please lay it on us.
ZRod
Well-known member
Maybe the first two years, but the last two anytime you flip by CNN, ABC, NBC, and very occasionally Fox they called them lies.
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Mierin
Donor
DevoHusker
New member
Guy Chamberlin
Well-known member
You shared the article with the group,. Is it just because you liked their bar graph?
BigRedBuster
Well-known member
I’m sorry, but I’m tired of hearing stuff like this from people who voted for Trump. The main news outlets were not unfair to Trump. He’s a piece of s#!t that has been building towards this week for four years. His actions over the last four years deserved to he reported.Archy1221 said:
He didn’t all of a sudden become a bad guy and a cancer on our country this week.
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