Scylla, would you mind responding to Kimstu? She asks some pretty relevant questions.
And are you going to back up the premise that both candidates necessarily generate an equal amount of positive and negative stories? Just from an ex ante perspective, it seems like the losing candidate is always more likely to go negative and generate critical media coverage, no?
They list nineteen variables for each story in the PEJ news coverage index. Secondary coding for “tone” was done for this study.
"Tone Variable
The tone variable measures whether a story’s tone is constructed in a way, via use of quotes, assertions, or innuendo, which results in positive, neutral, or negative coverage for the primary figure as it relates to the topic of the story. While reading or listening to a story, coders tallied up all the comments that have either a negative or positive tone to the reporting. Direct and indirect quotes were counted along with assertions made by journalists themselves.
In order for a story to be coded as either “positive” or “negative,” it must have either 1.5 times the amount of positive comments to negative comments, or 1.5 times the amount of negative comments to positive comments (with an exception for 2 to 3, which is coded as “neutral”). If the headline or lead has a positive or negative tone, it was counted twice into the total value. Also counted twice for tone were the first three paragraphs or first four sentences, whichever came first.
Any story where the ratio of positive to negative comments was less than 1.5 to 1 was considered a “neutral” story."
Frankly the methodology you linked to is totally unenlightening for our purposes (not your fault I know but still…).
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Not completely. Some more of the methodology is in the footnotes, such as what I put in quotation marks.
A reported quote counts as positive or negative coverage?
OK, that aside, how do they determine what constitutes positive or negative? I asked you this, and you ignored it. What words or phrases are construed by the counters as positive or negative?
Ok. No. I will not be writing to Foxnews about 2004. The statistics quoted require a cite.
No. I’m not. It’s beyond reason to try to analyze absolutely everything they have done in their lives and decide what might create a positive, negative, or neutral story. I am simply accepting as a given that both Obama and McCain have, in the course of living and campaigning created a huge pool of potential stories to draw upon, and for lack of an alternative we may consider it substantially equal.
Hmmm. No. I don’t think so. I thought Bush ran a more negative campaign then Kerry did. I thought Bush was more negative than Mccain in the Republican primary of 2000.
I think both Obama and McCain are being very negative towards each other both in their debates and in their advertising, though I’d give a generous edge to McCain in terms of negativity and degree.
But no, I do not think the loser is the more negative as a rule.
Heck, by that standard, the Disney Channel is best of all because their statements about Obama and McCain have been equally positive, negative and neutral, all around.
According to the methodology it depends on the content of the quote.
You have access to the same information that I do at the end of the report where the tone coding is discussed, as well as in the methodology.
I’d suggest you look at the primary source directly so you don’t have to rely on my interpretation. That’s why I gave the cites.
So do you admit that the 2004 election coverage by Fox was, by the “neutrality=fairness” principle you’re arguing for here, much more unfair than that of the three broadcast networks?
But again this does not account for the actual tenor of the piece. If someone says, “McCain has misconstrued what Obama’s position on oil drilling is” would be marked negative reporting on McCain. If someone says, “Obama consorts with terrorists” that is a negative remark towards Obama. But they are nowhere near equivalent are they?
See the problem?
Turn on FOX News and you get lots of “Obama consorts with terrorists” stuff. Merely ticking one box for “negative” hardly covers it does it? Compiling such a tally washes out a great deal of important detail.
I see no immediate reason to doubt the veracity of the study.
Fox had 40% negative pieces for McCain, but only 22% positive. In the spirit of arbitrariness, let’s turn it into decibels for easy addition and subtraction. The “positive noise” at Fox is 10log(.22) - 10log(0.4) = -2.6dB. In a perfectly “balanced” world, this should be 0dB, so Fox is clearly anti-McCain. This is confirmed by the “positive noise” for Obama which is only -2.0dB. So the noise about Obama is about 0.6dB more than for McCain.
For the overall media, there was about about 0.93dB loud blather for Obama, while the media’s positive blather for McCain was -6.1db, for a startling pro-Obama noise of 7.0 db! My ears are ringing.
I show MSNBC to have a pro-Obama blather of 4.9dB and a pro-McCain blather of -8.2 db, for an overall pro-Obama noise of 13.1dB.
Let’s suppose people, in general, are smarter than journalists, and therefore form their opinions irrespective of “obvious” bias in the media. Hey, if Scylla can suppose “fair” news coverage means equal number of pro-candidate[sub]n[/sub] pieces, I can assume this, right? Relative to the 270 EC votes needed to win, current polling (which is obviously beyond question) as revealed by electoral-vote.com (which just happens to agree with intrade.com) means that the pro-Obama noise as measured by the microphones off pollsters is 1.2dB, while pro-McCain noise is -1.6dB, for an overall pro-Obama noise of 2.8dB.
My god, what does it all mean? You really can’t get more scientific than this. Clearly almost all the news stations fail to reflect the man on the ground, who is shouting for Obama almost twice as loud as for McCain, but no more, damn it.
Well, most of us disagree with your premise. If you’re trying to persuade people, it is your burden to convince them of your premises. So if you’re not willing to defend it, we don’t have much to debate.
We can disagree about the general principle because in this case you concede that McCain has been more negative. So all we need to establish to refute your premise is that there will be more negative media stories when the candidate is more negative. Not sure that requires a cite, but here’s one anyway.
No I brought a neutral one.
What makes you think is not fair and balanced? thats like comparing the LA clippers to the LA lakers and saying sportcasters are biased because theres a lot more negative commentary about the shitty team. Obama has run a flawless campaign, McCain has not only made strategic mistakes over and over again but has taken the campaign into the gutter when he got desperate. He is also running for the party that has ruined our country for the past eight years. Expecting there to be an equal number of negative coverage of both campaigns is frankly beyond ridiculous, those numbers you are quoting is what unbiased reporting SHOULD look like.
As I understand this, would it be correct to say that a story containing precisely 1.5 times one extreme of remark over the other would be recorded the same as a story where one type outweighed the other by, for example, 10 times? That is to say, a story with a reasonably positive amount of comments is recorded the same as a story with an immensely positve amount of comments?
That’s an important point albeit a sometimes counter intuitive one. It’s like getting a random sample of numbers (say a dice roll). Most people feel a truly random sample should have no streaks (eg a string of five “1’s”). In fact a truly random sample is absolutely expected to have such streaks in it.
Fair and balanced reporting by no means suggests you have five positive stories for five negative stories. If a candidate pulls a gun and shoots a puppy during a stump speech I think it is reasonable to assume fair reporting will have a lot of negative stories about that.
Thank you for the cite.
I wouldn’t say that I “admit it.” That would imply that I am disinclined to believe it, or would argue against it, if I could. It also suggests that it has something to do with me personally.
I can assure you that I am not responsible for the content of Foxnews, so there is really nothing for me to “admit.”
I simply stated that your assertion required a cite. You provided it. It appears to be a good one.
Looking at the footnotes it appears to me that they got their data from…
PEW.
So, you’ve done me a favor. It’s going to be harder to argue that PEW would be sully the facts in an attempt to make Fox news appear unbiased when they showed them to be biased in a similar study in 2004.
Also, whether or not Fox news was biased in 2004 does little to detract from my argument that a study shows them to be fair and balanced in 2008.
What do you think changed at Fox News between '04 and '08 that so radically altered their fairness? In the absence of some good explanation for the change in Fox News institutional bias, it seems more likely that we simply cannot conclude anything from either study about fairness.
I, for one, do not think Pew is intentionally trying to skew their numbers. I believe they approach their task fairly and try to produce meaningful datasets. As we have shown here it is very difficult to produce a reliable study on such a subjective issue (eg reporting on shooting a puppy is negative but also fair). Likewise I think the likes of Media Matters do a scholarly job. I think it far more likely that someone at FOX understood how they pulled their numbers and gamed the system.
Nevertheless I think the study is far too simplistic to give a reliable picture. The proof of this is the assertion in the OP and then going to your TV and watching FOX News for an hour or two. Go to News Hounds who have made it their purpose in life to track Fox News bullshit.
Perhaps a really telling study of news and their bias is just too difficult or too large a task to be done well. I do not know. Clearly however there are problems with this study so should be taken with a grain of salt (I will note that I am dismayed and MSNBC going so far left as well…while I lean left to be sure to me that is as bogus as FOX going right…I am equal opportunity in wanting to see balanced reporting).
I think so.
It seems to me that a story is either positive negative or neutral according to their methodology. There appears to be no allowance made for degree.
This appears to be mitigated in the study by the other part of the tonal coding which looks at what’s being discussed. “horserace, issues, personal,” etc.
You really have to read and study the whole piece and it’s methodologies to get a good feel for it.
It has it’s flaws, but I beleive they’ve attempted a pretty rational and consistent approach to tackling a sticky problem.
I disagree. I don’t need to explain why something happened in order to suggest that it did.
Even if we were to grant that Fox was more balanced, does that make them more accurate?