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Subject: Networks Stressed the Negative in Comments About Bush, Study Finds<By Howard
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 05:02:45 EST
Message-ID: <9.1992Nov16.050246@AmeriCast.com>

Networks Stressed the Negative in Comments About Bush, Study
Finds<By Howard Kurtz=Washington Post Staff Writer=

People who believe that the three major television networks gave
President Bush a tougher time than Democrat Bill Clinton might
have a point, a new study suggests.

During the fall campaign, 71 percent of the comments about Bush
on the network evening newscasts were negative, compared to 48
percent about Clinton and 55 percent about independent Ross
Perot, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.  The
tally does not include comments by the candidates and their
aides, or evaluations of which candidate was likely to win.

"Reporters were encouraged to put their judgments into the
stories, and they judged Clinton to be a more desirable candidate
than Bush," said Robert Lichter, the center's director.  "The
problem with reporters giving their version of reality, instead
of transmitting competing claims, is that it makes them players
instead of referees. It's a slippery slope toward partisan re-
porting."

But negative assessments of the Bush effort may have reflected
the reality of a losing campaign. In 1988, for example, the
center found that 69 percent of network comments about Democratic
nominee Michael S. Dukakis were negative, compared to 62 percent
about Bush.

"When you have an incumbent president sitting on top of a rotten
economy and scandals ranging from the State Department to the
Justice Department, there's so many more negative things people
can say about him," said Erik Sorenson, executive producer of the
"CBS Evening News." "We had trouble finding people, even Republi-
cans, who would say nice things about George Bush."

Bill Wheatley, NBC's political director, said, "Some of those
figures may reflect the poor quality of the Bush campaign. I
don't believe there was an active bias at work."

The public view of overall media performance - electronic and
print - is sharply divided along partisan lines, according to a
separate survey conducted on the weekend after the election by
the Times Mirror Center on the People and the Press. Eighty-three
percent of the Democrats surveyed said the coverage was fair to
Clinton, but only 41 percent of "I don't believe there was an ac-
tive bias. . . . "<

-Bill Wheatley,>NBC political director>

Republicans said it was fair to Bush.  Among all voters polled,
67 percent said the coverage was fair to Perot.

In the same vein, 65 percent of Republicans, but only 29 percent
of Democrats, thought the press had too much influence on the
campaign.

For all the talk about more substantive coverage, the network
study found that, ABC, CBS and NBC did more stories after Labor
Day on the horse race (258) than on the issues (233). The net-
works focused more on policy than polls in September, but the
number of horse-race stories tripled in October.

"Only an academic could possibly believe that's not the most im-
portant story in the final weeks of October," said Hal Bruno,
ABC's political director.

"We covered all the major issues three, four, five times, over
and over," Sorenson said. "In October we looked at each other and
said, 'What the hell else is there to say?' When Perot jumped
back into the race, the horse race became a pretty fascinating
news story."

Lichter contended that the networks were too intrusive, noting
that journalists received 71 percent of the air time on the even-
ing news and the candidates just 12 percent. But the study fails
to note that the candidates had unprecedented access to network
talk shows this year.  "I don't think there's a voter in America
who could say he or she didn't get the opportunity to hear the
candidates at length, whether it was on the said. "Partly because
of that availability, we found ourselves more in the business of
truth-telling. It's precisely what newspapers do."

The networks' assessments of political ads, voter satisfaction
and the campaign's quality was negative more than 93 percent of
the time. But voters themselves were far more upbeat. Seventy-
seven percent of the 1,012 voters surveyed by Times Mirror said
they learned enough to make an informed choice, up from 59 per-
cent four years ago. The increase was largely due to Democrats,
whose opinion of the news media has improved markedly since 1988.

Thirty-six percent of those surveyed rated the campaign coverage
A or B - a slight improvement over 1988 - while 31 percent gave
the press a D or F. Black voters were nearly twice as likely as
whites to give the press high marks.<02:11 11-16C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)