Conservative media bias!

Check out this chart from Pew summarizing positive vs. negative media coverage of Republican presidential candidates and President Obama:

Now, if one were to take the common conservative approach to media criticism, this is where you would yell, “conservative media bias– they hate Obama!”  Instead, we’ll take the political science approach.   Does journalists hate Obama?  Of course not.  Do presidents who face a struggling economy and cannot get anything they want through Congress because of an intransigent opposition party in control of one of the houses receive a lot of negative coverage?  You betcha.   That’s a lot of negative stuff to talk about in reference to Obama.  Surely numerous instances of the negative coverage are in reference to how the poor economy is bad for him and about his low approval ratings (which, of course, largely stem from the poor economy).

On the flip side, it would be absurd (and following the standard path of conservative media criticism) to assume the media loves Rick Perry.  What the media loves is the story of a candidate who dramatically enters a presidential race, and who quickly climbs to the top of the polls.  There’s another chart that tracks coverage over time and you can see the recent decline of Perry’s coverage.  Did the media decide they hate him?  Of course not.  They decided to report the fact that his campaign has been struggling– which it has, and which is a negative thing.

Short version: you should always be skeptical of claims of ideologically-based media bias– chances are it’s almost always a different form of bias driving coverage.  Also, the whole Pew report is quite interesting if you click over to it.