This disconcerting report was delivered in a just completed study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Despite the traditional and tired belly-aching from Republican candidates that the so-called left-leaning press is a bias against them, the study proves conclusively the contrary has been happening for the first three-and-a-half months of the year. The Pew Research was compiled via an accumulation and analysis of thousands of articles about the campaign.
It concluded “while a sitting president may have access to the ‘bully pulpit’ that does not mean he has control of the media narrative, particularly during the other party’s primary season.”
The negative narrative was driven by several factors, the report concludes:
- One was the consistent criticism leveled at him by each of the Republican contenders during primary season.
- The other factor involved news coverage of issues that ranged from the tumultuous economic recovery to foreign policy to the vicious opposition to Obama’s health care legislation, “with which he was inextricably linked,” the authors write..
- The ever-escalating gas prices nationwide, for which the sitting president is getting the balance of the blame.
In stark contrast, Pew Research Center said the “positive coverage outweighed negative for Mitt Romney in six of the fifteen weeks and was fairly evenly divided in four more.”
–terry shropshire
