About that Pew Research Center study that claimed Obama gets great press
June 15, 2009 2:56 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
It's the one conservatives, and even Beltway pundits, are still crowing about as definitive proof that the press has swooned over Obama; that it refuses to write critically about the new president. That the press has a liberal bias.
It's all very awful and dangerous, we're told again and again:
The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment; but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.
That was the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson, who built a recent column around the Pew study. In fact, it was the only evidence Samuelson used to prove his point. The Pew study said it all, right?
First, we've never been crazy about the Pew studies simply because they're an act of faith. Pew says its researchers look over all kinds of media coverage and determine which reports are "favorable," which were "neutral" and which were "negative." Personally, I don't see how most news report could or would fit into any category but "neutral."
Does Pew really suggest that Newsweek or the New York Times routinely publish political news article that are entirely positive or entirely negative. That doesn't sound like the news report I'm familiar with.
But more importantly with the Obama study, Pew made a very big deal about the fact that 42 percent of Obama's press coverage was, according to its researchers, positive. But when you start poking around Pew's methodology, that number doesn't look so firm. Why? Because the 42 percent figure was culled from a study that examined just seven media outlets to determine the tone of Obama's coverage.
No joke. The Pew study only monitored coverage in the Times, the WashPost, Newsweek, as well as the evening news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS.
That kind of study might have worked in 1984 or even 1994. But it in no way reflects the mushrooming media choices news consumers face today. And that's why, to Pew's credit, it did a second, broader study, which monitored Obama's coverage among nearly 50 media outlets, including cable TV and online.
What were the results of that study? Obama's press coverage was first and foremost neutral, not positive: 40 percent neutral, 37 percent positive and 23 percent negative. But rather than go with the headline "Obama's Press Coverage Mostly Neutral," Pew hyped the finding from the study with the ridiculously small media base and crowed that the new president's coverage was quite favorable.
BTW, the name of the Pew study was "Obama's First 100 Days" even though it really wasn't:
“Obama’s First 100 Days” is based on the aggregated data and coding from January 21 through March 21, 2009. This timeframe begins the day following the inauguration of President Obama and runs through his 60th day in office.
I'm just sayin'.
Why did they bother at all? I say "PhEW! Something stinks about this.
1) Ask if a rank-and-file reporter is liberal. Don't ask if they write liberal things.
2) Focus on those three piddly nightly minutes on the major networks where some dusty guy reads national news in a monotone, sanitized for maximum blandness. Don't bother with those hour-long cable shows where they systematically shove a full ideology in your face.
is running wild, according to conservatives.
I remember a study done back in the 70's in an effort to prove liberal media bias, and its base was even more skewed than the recent PEW job--they interviewed low-level employees of PBS stations in Boston, New York, and Washington DC. It's the single most discredited sampling ever done for a study of its kind, and yet it helped lay the foundation for the "conventional wisdom" about the media being liberal. What it actually proved was that the conservatives were willing to stop at nothing to force a gullible public to think they way they do.