Newspapers: [...] For the top tier Democrats, the positive tilt was even more the case than for Democrats in general. Obamas front page coverage in the sample was 70% positive and 9% negative and Clintons was similarly 61% positive and 13% negative.
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Online [...] Another distinction was in who got covered. Online, Barack Obama was the most covered candidate, not Hillary Clinton. The Illinois Senator was the focus of 19% of all election stories vs. 10% for Clinton and 11% for Giuliani.
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Evening News [...] The tone of coverage in the 30-minute evening newscasts was much more positive toward the Democrats than Republicans. And again, among the major candidates, Obama got the best of it and McCain the worst.
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Network Morning NewSunrise Shows Feature Obama and Romney [...]
PBS [...] Otherwise, top candidates Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani were the primary figures for just a single story each, as were lesser-known candidates Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, and Tom Tancredo. (Hillary Clinton had two stories in all.)
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CNN: The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidatesby a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain fairing the worst (63% negative) and Romney fairing a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral.
Its not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half of the Illinois Senators stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama.
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NPRMorning Edition [...] Looking at specific candidates, stories about Barack Obama carried a clearly positive tone two-thirds of the time. Not a single Morning Edition story was negative. Furthermore, 43% of Hillary Clintons coverage was positive vs. 14% negative.
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