Campaign Coverage Still Focuses On 'Horse Race,' Says Study

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS, HILLARY
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Howard Kurtz]
According to a new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in the first five months of 2007, 17 percent of media coverage about the Presidential election were about Sen Hillary Clinton, followed by Sen Barack Obama (14 percent), Rudy Giuliani (9 percent), Sen John McCain (7 percent) and Mitt Romney (5 percent). Everyone else was a relative blip. The two front-runners, Clinton and Giuliani, achieved a rough parity: 37 percent of the stories about them were negative and 27 percent positive, with the rest neutral. Overall, though, the Democratic candidates drew more positive stories (35 percent) than the Republicans (26 percent). That, says the Washington-based research group -- which conducted the study with Harvard's Shorenstein Center -- was almost entirely due to the friendly coverage accorded Obama (47 percent positive) and the heavily negative treatment of McCain (12 percent positive). The project examined coverage by newspapers (The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and several smaller ones); network morning and evening broadcasts; cable news shows; radio programs, including those of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Ed Schultz; and such major Web sites as Yahoo and AOL. The positive and negative assessments have little to do with the candidates' stances on Iraq, health care or taxes, or even a rudimentary judgment on whether they would make a good president. Instead, the tone is a measure of their standing in the polls. When Obama was hot, reporters kept repeating the words "rock star" like a mantra; now that the Illinois senator is way behind, he is seen as badly out of tune.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/28/AR2007102801626.html
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* Campaign Coverage Still Focuses On 'Horse Race,' Says Study
News coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign has centered predominantly on just five candidates, offered very little information about their public records or what they would do in office, and focused more than 60% of stories on political and tactical aspects of the race, according to a joint study released Monday.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003664501

* The Invisible Primary -- Invisible No Longer
http://www.journalism.org/node/8187