It is almost a certainty that any similar study of the leftist-controlled, 24 hour news/entertainment/media complex in Australia would find at least as bad a leftist bias, if not more.
Sorry, chuck, the facts are plain. Do a bit more research on press bias and you might find yourself to be unpleasantly surprised how bad it actually is. That is of course unless you are one of those people who believe that any means, fair or foul, are acceptable in order to sieze power from the voters of Australia and hand it back to the tyranny of the union bosses and their puppet labor talking dolls.
The Harvard study — conducted with the Project for Excellence in Journalism, part of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press — examined 1,742 presidential campaign stories appearing from January through May in 48 print, online, network TV, cable and radio news outlets.
Among many findings, it determined that Democrats got more coverage than Republicans (49% of the stories vs. 31%). It also found the "tone" of the coverage was more positive for Democrats (35% to 26% for Republicans).
"In other words," the authors say, "not only did the Republicans receive less coverage overall, the attention they did get tended to be more negative than that of Democrats. And in some specific media genres, the difference is particularly striking."
Those "genres" include the most mainstream of media — newspapers and TV. Fully 59% of front-page stories about Democrats in 11 newspapers had a "clear, positive message vs. 11% that carried a negative tone."
For "top-tier" candidates, the difference was even more apparent: Barack Obama's coverage was 70% positive and 9% negative, and Hillary Clinton's was 61% positive and 13% negative.
By contrast, 40% of the stories on Republican candidates were negative and 26% positive.
On TV, evening network newscasts gave 49% of their campaign coverage to the Democrats and 28% to Republicans. As for tone, 39.5% of the Democratic coverage was positive vs. 17.1%, while 18.6% of the Republican coverage was positive and 37.2% negative.
These findings are in line with a number of other studies that date back to the early 1970s:
• In 1972, "The News Twisters" by Edith Efron analyzed every prime-time network news show before the 1968 election and found coverage tilted 8 to 1 against Nixon on ABC, 10 to 1 on NBC and 16 to 1 on CBS.
• In 1984, Public Opinion magazine found that Reagan got 7,230 seconds of negative coverage and just 730 seconds of positive; Mondale's positive press totaled 1,330 seconds, vs. 1,050 negative.
• In 1986, "The Media Elite" surveyed 240 journalists at virtually every major media outlet and found that in presidential elections from 1964 to 1976, 86% of top journalists voted Democratic. A 2001 update found 76% voted for Dukakis in 1988 and 91% went for Clinton in 1992.
• A 1992 Freedom Forum poll showed 89% of Washington reporters and bureau chiefs voting for Clinton in '92 and only 7% for George H.W. Bush.
• A 2003 Pew survey found 34% of national journalists called themselves liberal and 7% conservative. By 7 to 1, they also felt they weren't critical enough of President Bush.
• In 2005, a study of bias by professors at UCLA, Stanford and the University of Chicago determined that only one media outlet — Fox News Special Report — could be tagged "right of center."
