Debunking the Obama - MSM love story myth

[Abacus]

CHARACTER AND THE PRIMARIES OF 2008:
What Were the Media Master Narratives about the Candidates During the Primary Season?

If campaigns for president are in part a battle for control of the master narrative about character, Democrat Barack Obama has not enjoyed a better ride in the press than rival Hillary Clinton, according to a new study of primary coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
From January 1, just before the Iowa caucuses, through March 9, following the Texas and Ohio contests, the height of the primary season, the dominant personal narratives in the media about Obama and Clinton were almost identical in tone, and were both twice as positive as negative, according to the study, which examined the coverage of the candidates’ character, history, leadership and appeal—apart from the electoral results and the tactics of their campaigns.
The trajectory of the coverage, however, began to turn against Obama, and did so well before questions surfaced about his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Shortly after Clinton criticized the media for being soft on Obama during a debate, the narrative about him began to turn more skeptical—and indeed became more negative than the coverage of Clinton herself. What’s more, an additional analysis of more general campaign topics suggests the Obama narrative became even more negative later in March, April and May.

...

Hillary Clinton
The findings here also belie the idea that Obama enjoyed the most positive coverage, or that the press has somehow gone easier on him than on Clinton during the primaries. In the roughly 10 weeks studied, the former first lady had just as much success in the press as her rival in projecting the narratives she wanted about her personality, history, leadership and character: Fully 67% of the assertions about her as a person were positive, versus one-third ( 33%) negative—numbers almost identical to Obama.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/reports/Character%20and%20the%20Primaries%20of%202008.pdf

[Captain Hilts]

1. Must not have read the NYT or WP op pages. Or listened to sportstalk, or Steph Miller, or...

Randy Rhodes, or KO, or Matthews...

[Abacus]

3. Wrong

Sample Design
The content was based on media coverage originally analyzed for PEJ’s weekly News Coverage Index (NCI) from January 1-March 9, 2008.
Each week, the NCI examines the coverage from 48 different outlets in five media sectors, including newspapers, online news, network TV, cable TV, and radio. Following a system of rotation, 35 outlets each weekday are studied as well as 7 newspapers each Sunday.
For this particular study of campaign coverage, ABC and CBS radio headlines were excluded. Therefore, the 46 media outlets examined for this campaign study were as follows:
Newspapers (13 in all)
The New York Times was coded every day
Coded two out of these four every day The Washington Post Los Angeles Times USA Today The Wall Street Journal
Coded two out of these four every day The Boston Globe Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Austin American-Statesman Albuquerque Journal
Coded 2 out of these 4 every day The Sun Chronicle (Attleboro, MA) Star Beacon (Ashtabula, Ohio) Chattanooga Times Free Press The Bakersfield Californian
Web sites (Five in all, Mon-Fri) CNN.com Yahoo News MSNBC.com
39
Google News AOL News
Network TV (Seven in all, Mon-Fri) Morning shows ABC – Good Morning America CBS – Early Show NBC – Today
Evening news ABC – World News Tonight CBS – CBS Evening News NBC – NBC Nightly News PBS – Newshour with Jim Lehrer
Cable TV (Fifteen in all, Mon-Fri)
Daytime (2:00 to 2:30 pm) coded 2 out of 3 every day CNN Fox News MSNBC
Nighttime CNN – coded 3 out of the 4 every day Lou Dobbs Tonight Situation Room (6 pm) Out in the Open/CNN Election Center Anderson Cooper 360 Nighttime Fox News – coded 3 out of the 4 every day Special Report w/ Brit Hume Fox Report w/ Shepard Smith O’Reilly Factor Hannity & Colmes
Nighttime MSNBC – coded 2 out of the 4 every day Tucker (6 pm) Hardball (7 pm) Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann Live with Dan Abrams
Radio (Six in all, Mon-Fri)
NPR Morning Edition every day *
40
*From January 1 to 11, we coded the first half-hour of “Morning Edition” (5:00-5:30 am); from Jan 14 on, we coded following a rotation between the first half-hour (5:00-5:30 am) and the first 30 minutes of the second hour (6:00-6:30 am).
Talk Radio
Rush Limbaugh was coded every day
One out of two additional conservatives each day Sean Hannity Michael Savage
One out of two liberals each day Ed Schultz Randi Rhodes
From that content, the study included all campaign-related stories:
• On the front page of newspapers
• In the entirety of commercial network evening newscasts.
• The first 30 minutes of network morning news, the PBS evening news, and all cable programs
• The first 30 minutes of the talk radio programs and a 30 minute segment of NPR’s Morning Edition
• The top 5 stories on each website at the time of capture
The basic NCI codebook codes for topic at three different levels, and includes the following variables: date coded, Story ID number, story date, source, broadcast start time, broadcast story start timecode, headline, story word count, placement/prominence, story format, story describer, broadcast story ending timecode and lead newsmaker. Since January 1, 2008, three additional variables were analyzed for campaign stories in the NCI routine coding. These included the variables campaign lead newsmakers, significant presence and presidential campaign topic. The complete methodology for the weekly NCI and CCI, a sub-set of NCI, has further details on the coding system and intercoder reliability.
Sample Selection
Stories from January 1 through March 9, 2008
To arrive at the sample for this particular study of campaign coverage, we began by pulling all the stories from January 1 through March 9, 2008, that were originally coded as campaign stories, meaning that 50% or more of the story was devoted to discussion of the ongoing presidential campaign. From that group, we selected stories that focused on at least one of the five candidates (Mitt Romney, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama) for 25% or more of the time or space of the story.
41
All newspaper and online stories were then included. For broadcast, stories 30 seconds or less was removed from the sample. For the stories from cable TV and the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) further sampling was conducted by selecting every other campaign story by outlet. This was done by listing the stories from each show in chronological order and randomly selecting the first story. We then selected every-other story within each outlet to arrive at the final sample of television stories.
This process resulted in the following sample size for the stories from 2008: 2,590 total stories, including 413 newspaper stories, 281 stories from news websites, 540 stories from network TV, 984 from cable TV, and 372 from radio programs. Out of these stories, we discovered and coded 5,374 total assertions.

[papau]

6. no you are wrong - sorry but noting Obama "experience" is not MSM negative

[Captain Hilts]

7. When examining newspapers they did not look at op-ed page. nt

[TexasObserver]

2. Hillary threw a FIT when media stopped treating her like The President Elect

[Abacus]

4. Favorable Clinton coverage on morning shows

If Clinton and Obama had nearly identical success in the press overall, this was clearly not the case on network morning news shows. The first 30 minutes of these programs from January 1 through March 9 painted an especially positive personal narrative about Clinton, more so than the media overall and much rosier than the narrative image portrayed of Obama.

[papau]

5. Bull - Define noting Obama lack of experience as negative MSM and forget the MSNBC/MSM slime re Hill

[hokies4ever]

8. Does Hillary love delusion as much as you do?

:rofl: