Quote:
Originally posted by honeychile
I suppose I'm posting this to see how many of y'all will freak out at Reuters' findings!
The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.
Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
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Let's point out that this survey wasn't done by Reuters -- they are simply reporting on it.
Then I have one other question. If X% of the stories either in total or aimed at one candidate or another are negative -- what are the rest of the stories? Positive or neutral, I suppose.
Which would seem to me, then, that the vast majority of the coverage is in those latter categories.
Finally, the fact that a number of stories toward a candidate or the war are negative doesn't necessarily mean the various media are biased. It may be that the negativity in the stories was deserved. For instance, it's difficult to write a positive story about prisoner abuse.
Which all comes down to what many of us think -- you can make a survey seem to mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean in your own mind.