Washington's Times and Post: A difference

Let's compare The Washington Times' and Washington Post's July 11 covererage of The Center for Media and Public Affairs' study of the 3 major TV networks' coverage of President Bush during the first 100 days of his second term.

The Center's study is titled: "No Second Term Media Honeymoon for Bush." Its major finding: By a 2 to 1 margin, network coverage of Bush was negative.

With the lead, Bush finds no friends at networks, The Washington Times ran a 475 story that began:

President Bush just can't win with the broadcast networks.

More than two-thirds of the news stories on ABC, NBC and CBS covering the first 100 days of Mr. Bush's second term were negative, according to an analysis released today by the District-based Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA).

It's actually a slight improvement: During the first 100 days of his initial term in office, the coverage was 71 percent negative, according to a similar CMPA study conducted in 2001.

In comparison, President Clinton's first-term news coverage was 59 percent negative in 1993.

The Times provided comments by the center's director, specific examples of negative network coverage, and placed the study's findings within the context of past media Bush-bashing.

But Bush-bashing seems to be entrenched. The press "battered" the president during the 2004 election season, according to a Project for Excellence in Journalism analysis of 817 print and broadcast stories that ran in October.

Mr. Bush "suffered strikingly more negative press coverage than challenger John Kerry," the study stated. "Overall, 59 percent of Bush-dominated stories were clearly negative in nature," while "just 25 percent of Kerry stories were decidedly negative."

The Post, on the other hand, didn't run any news story. But Howard Kurtz did mention the study at the bottom of his Media Notes column. Here's all of what Kurtz said:

President Bush got better network news coverage of the first 100 days of his second term than the first time around -- but only by a hair.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs says that 33 percent of the comments about Bush on the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news were positive earlier this year, compared with 29 percent during his first 100 days. ("NBC Nightly News" was kinder and gentler this year, with 43 percent positive evaluations.) In neither period, the center says, did the president approach the positive coverage accorded Bill Clinton (43 percent) or Bush's father (63 percent).

Findings such as those of the Center for Media and Public Affairs and Project for Excellence in Journalism are extremely important.

The Washington Post should report them more fully and fairly.
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There's an excellent blog, PostWatch, that reports on the sort of tilted Post coverage described here. Let's hope PostWatch can help improve the Post. Visit PostWatch regularly to see how they're doing.