Harvard [Harvard????] Finds Leftward Media Tilt

Just One Minute:

It must be pretty obvious if they can see it at Harvard...

Just like so many reports before it, a joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — hardly a bastion of conservative orthodoxy — found that in covering the current presidential race, the media are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans.

Democrats are not only favored in the tone of the coverage. They get more coverage period. This is particularly evident on morning news shows, which "produced almost twice as many stories (51% to 27%) focused on Democratic candidates than on Republicans."

...
The press also gave some candidates measurably more favorable coverage than others. Democrat Barack Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois, enjoyed by far
the most positive treatment of the major candidates during the first five months of the year—followed closely by Fred Thompson, the actor who at the time was
only considering running.
...
Do keep in mind that in this study "the media" includes talk radio, the conservative beacon; presumably the numbers for the press and the Big Three networks have a different tilt. Here we go on the press:

Another distinguishing characteristic of the print stories studied was tone.
Democrats got much more positive coverage in the daily papers examined than they did elsewhere. Fully 59% of all stories about Democrats had a clear, positive message vs. 11% that carried a negative tone. That is roughly double the percentage of positive stories that we found in the media generally. Just under a third (30%) of the front page stories examined were neutral.

For the top tier Democrats, the positive tilt was even more the case than for Democrats in general. Obama’s front page coverage in the sample was 70% positive and 9% negative and Clinton’s was similarly 61% positive and 13%
negative.

Republican candidates, in contrast, were more likely to receive clearly negative stories in print than elsewhere: 40% negative vs. 26% positive and 34% neutral.

And here we go on the Big Three network nightly news:

Network evening news closely reflected the overall media when it came to dividing time between Democrat and Republican candidates (49% vs. 28%). While all three produced more stories about Democrats than Republicans, at the NBC Evening News the gap was smaller—just an 11 percentage point difference (41% Democrats vs. 30% Republicans) vs. roughly a 30 percentage point gap at ABC and CBS.

The tone of coverage in the 30-minute evening newscasts was much more positive toward the Democrats than Republicans. And again, among the major candidates, Obama got the best of it and McCain the worst. Of the 11 stories primarily about McCain that ran on the nightly news in the first five months of the year, not a single one carried a clearly positive tone. Six of them were clearly negative and five were neutral.

They also include a graphic telling us that for the Big Three nightly news show, the tone for stories featuring Dems was 39% positive, 43% neutral and 17% negative; for Reps, the corresponding figures are 19% positive, 44& neutral, and 37% negative.

Basically, we have a liberal press and liberal network news - imagine my surprise.

Are there surprises in cable land? Not really:

What distinguished cable news more in the first five months of the year was the tone of the coverage. The positive-negative breakdown of Democrats followed roughly the same trend as the media overall (34% positive vs. 25% negative).

But the tone of Republican coverage was quite different. On cable TV, stories about Republican candidates were nearly as likely to be positive as to be negative (29% positive vs. 30% negative).

But those numbers only reflect the three major cable news channels taken together. When you look at the coverage of each one, there are significant differences in how the candidates were treated. CNN gave decidedly more negative coverage to Republican candidates; Fox was more negative towards Democrats--and more positive towards Republicans; MSNBC gave decidedly positive coverage towards both.

CNN tilts left, Fox tilts right, MSNBC is schizo - works for me. But the devil is in the details at CNN - they are fair and balanced with all Dems except Obama, about whom they are scarcely able to find bad news to report:

It’s not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half
of the Illinois Senator’s stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama.

Fox News, although tilting right, is probably closest to something like fair and balanced, which means no proper lib needs to take this study seriously:

Fox News: The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative).

The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).
When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again,
neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.

I don't think the numbers leap from their text, so let me reprise them in Positive, Neutral, Negative order for:

Democrats on Fox: 24% Positive; 39% Neutral; 37% Negative

Republicans on Fox: 32% Positive; 47% Neutral; 21% Negative

Democrats on CNN: 28% Positive; 49% Neutral; 23% Negative

Republicans on CNN: 14% Positive; 46% Neutral; 41% Negative

FOX NEWS: Fair and Balanced.