Conservatives have complained for years that the news media were “in the tank” for Obama, and based on the results of a new Pew study, those claims seem to have been borne out.
The study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that during the last week of the campaign, media coverage of President Obama became even more positive, and Mitt Romney continued to receive a heavy dose of negative coverage.
In the final week of the campaign, from October 29 to November 5, positive stories about Obama outnumbered negative ones by a margin of 29% to 19%. On the other hand the tone of the coverage for Romney remained consistent, with negative stories outnumbering positive ones by a margin of 33% to 16%.
Romney also suffered in overall coverage, with Obama having a significant presence in 80 percent of campaign news stories to just 62 percent for Romney.
And in elections it’s all about momentum.
Pew also found that during the period from August 27 to November 5, while Obama had an overall gap of favorable to unfavorable news stories of minus nine percent, the gap for Romney was more than twice that at minus 22 percent.
MSNBC, which already had been the leading cable-news cheerleader for Obama during the campaign, upped the ante during the final week with positive coverage of the President jumping to 51% from 33% and negative mentions of Romney increasing to 68% from 57%, with Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell leading the way.
Romney lost the election for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was the overwhelming bias of the liberal media in favor of Obama. It clearly helped carry the day.
Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and its sister organization Accuracy in Academia. As the son of Reed Irvine, who launched AIM in 1969, he developed an understanding of media bias at an early age, and has been actively involved with AIM for over 30 years.
