The weight of coverage

The old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” A few months back John McCain complained he wasn’t getting as much news coverage as Barack Obama. The good news for McCain: Since the two party conventions, the amount of McCain coverage is about the same as coverage of Obama. The bad news: Most of it has been negative. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the six weeks after the conventions and through the final presidential debate. It found unfavorable stories about McCain outnumbered favorable ones by more than 3-1. Obama fared better. The center found coverage of the Democrat was 36 percent positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative. Meanwhile, McCain was hammered, with almost six in 10 stories decidedly negative. Just 14 percent were positive. Hard to argue that kind of tone disparity isn’t a factor in the overall race.

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