Press coverage of Mitt Romney’s campaign took a decidedly positive turn after the former Massachusetts governor won his home state of Michigan. But President Barack Obama hasn’t enjoyed a single week since early January where positive coverage outweighed negative coverage, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Pew monitored the tone and level of press coverage between Jan. 2 and April 15. Before the Michigan primary — Jan. 2 through Feb. 26 — 33 percent of Romney coverage was positive, compared to 37 percent negative. After the Michigan primary (Feb. 28), when the media narrative focused on the inevitability of Romney’s nomination, the candidate enjoyed 47 percent positive coverage to 25 percent negative coverage.
Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, told TPM the negative coverage of Obama is structural. “He had four or five candidates running against him, who all were condemning the president. As the press does the obligatory job of describing what the candidates say everyday, there’s a weight of criticism that mounts up against the person whose job they are trying to take.”
After Romney won Michigan, Pew found that media reports focused more on delegate math, and the press gave Romney an overwhelming amount of attention compared to his rivals.
Interestingly, in 2012’s endless political coverage, Pew found that 64 percent of this campaign’s coverage focused on the “horserace,” or campaign strategy. In 2008, “horserace” coverage accounted for 80 percent of the the campaign coverage. The infighting within the Republican party over Romney’s conservatism is one factor that explains the change, Rosenstiel said.
Pew used computer-assisted analysis of more than 11,000 news outlets, and human analysis of 52 key news outlets. The computers helped analyze the tone of the coverage, and the human analysis focused on the amount of coverage.
Read the full study here.
