Sunday, November 11, 2007
Harvard study is an indictment of the media
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- McDonnell's shiny, happy conservatives
- Sotomayor critics' knees are jerking
- It really was must-see TV
- Unclouding the torture debate
From the RoundTable blog
Conservative newspapers and bloggers were all over a recent report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy that found, as Investor's Business Daily put it, "In covering the current presidential race, the media are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans"
That was indeed one conclusion of the report, which said, "Overall, Democrats also have received more positive coverage than Republicans (35 percent of stories vs. 26 percent), while Republicans received more negative coverage than Democrats (35 percent vs. 26 percent). For both parties, a plurality of stories, 39 percent, were neutral or balanced."
Proof positive, as one e-mail correspondent put it, that "mainstream media has taken a sharp turn to the left."
Except there was a part of the report that most bloggers and others didn't notice. That was the part that said that the difference in tone was due entirely to the coverage received by two candidates: the incredibly fawning coverage of Sen. Barack Obama and the incessantly negative coverage of Sen. John McCain (whose campaign appeared to be imploding early in the race).
"When those two candidates are removed from the field, the tone of coverage for the two parties is virtually identical," the report said -- a fact noted in only two of the more than 200 blogs that commented on the report, according to a Google search.
In fact, the report found that the tone of coverage of the frontrunners in each party, Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Guiliani, was nearly identical. Stories about Clinton had a positive tone 26.9 percent of the time, compared to 27.8 percent for Guiliani. Stories about Clinton were negative 37.8 percent of the time, compared to 37 percent for Guiliani.
That's a case for a biased media?
In their zeal to find proof of liberal bias, most commentators on the report missed the real scandal: the unrelenting focus on politics rather than substance.
Most of the coverage concerned fundraising, poll numbers and tactics. While only 15 percent of stories looked at candidates' stances on issues, 63 percent focused on the horse race aspect.
Only about 1 percent of the stories focused on the public records of candidates.
This despite the fact that the public says it is hungry for substantial stories about candidates' positions on issues. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 77 percent of Americans want more coverage of the issues and candidates' stances on them.
The story here isn't that coverage of the presidential election is biased. The story is that the coverage is abysmally shallow and focused on politics rather than substance.
The report's authors acknowledged that even stories about campaign strategy and polling could give citizens insight into how candidates would run the nation. So they examined the focus of these stories.
"Did the information in the story mostly refer to how candidates might govern, i.e., what they believe in, their values, management style, personality and other similar matters? Or was it about matters that impact the candidates' or parties' chances of election?"
Even here, the media fell down. Eighty-six percent of the political stories focused on the impact on candidates' chances for election. Only 12 percent had a focus that gave any information about how a candidate might lead if elected.
As the report concluded, "Once again, the game of politics -- rather than the ideas or even the background of the personalities -- has dominated how the press has presented the race for president."
So, complain about a biased media if you must. But the real crime here is that the media are not giving the American people the information they need -- and want -- about how candidates would lead, where they stand on the issues and what their public records reveal.
Choosing the leader of the free world is not a game. How sad that the media treat it like one.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
