Media Coverage of Obama's first 100 Days

The Pew Research Center has coverage of the media tone and content of President Obama's first 100 days, comparing his coverage to that of Bush and Clinton. They compared coverage from Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS nightly newscasts. Wanna guess the results?

Here are the raw data in graphical form:



In an old post, I defined two statistics. The "Rooting for factor" (RFF) is the ratio of positive stories to negative stories about a single subject (or, in this case, a person, Obama). The "Bias factor" is the ratio of RFFs, for example the RFF for Obama vs. the RFF for Bush (or, in the previous post around election time, Obama vs. McCain).

One can easily calculate RFFs of 2.1 for Obama, 0.96 for Clinton, and 0.79 for Bush. This bias for Obama relative to Bush would be 2.1 / 0.79, which is 2.7. In other words, if you were used to seeing one positive portrayal of Bush for each negative story, for Obama you'd see nearly three times as many positive stories.

Pew delves deeper into the data. For Bush, the positive coverage dropped from the first to the second month as his "honeymoon" ended. Obama's coverage remains steadily positive. Obama has received favorable coverage in both news and editorial pages. Bush was generally castigated in editorials. The stories about Obama are more about his character and style, and less about ideology and the actual policies. In a final shock,

"On Fox, the majority of Obama stories were clearly negative in tone, ... On MSNBC, the majority of stories were clearly positive in tone".

Pew suggests that the reason for the difference may not be entirely media bias.

The different focus for Obama coverage may well reflect the reality that his first days in office have been very different from his predecessors .

It seems likely that the strategic nature of Obama’s coverage, and the focus on his leadership, is inextricably linked to the breakneck pace of his initiatives.

One other element that may have affected his coverage is the trend of the news industry—exemplified on the cable news talk shows—toward an ever more immediate horse race-oriented evaluation of the news.

This may be some of it. OpenLeft postulates that the coverage has been positive because Obama has been successful. But deep down inside, we know this. The Saturday Night Live spoofs hit too close: the media, other than Fox, is still in love with Obama. Phil Bronstein agrees - they need to "get a room". Which, in the short run, could be a good thing, as he will need some help and support to get America turned back in the right direction.