Just 14 percent of the stories about John McCain from the conventions through the final presidential debate were positive in tone, according to a study. Study: McCain coverage mostly negative

The good news for John McCain? He's now receiving as much attention from the national media as his Democratic rival. The bad news? It’s overwhelmingly negative.

Just 14 percent of the stories about John McCain, from the conventions through the final presidential debate, were positive in tone, according to a study released today, while nearly 60 percent were negative — the least favorable coverage of any of the four candidates on the two tickets.


The study, by The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpartisan journalism watchdog organization, examined 2,412 stories from 43 newspapers and cable news shows in the six-week period beginning just after the conventions and ending with the final presidential debate.

“Much of the increased attention for McCain derived from actions by the senator himself, actions that, in the end, generated mostly negative assessments,” the study found. “In many ways, the arc of the media narrative during this phase of the 2008 general election might best be described as a drama in which John McCain acted and Barack Obama reacted.”

Indeed, the increased and increasingly negative media attention for McCain isn’t surprising when looking at how the campaign’s strategy changed since the beginning of the general election.

“We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us,” spokesman Brian Rogers told Politico last month, adding later that “we intend to stay on offense.”

For Barack Obama, the study found coverage “has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so," with 36 percent of the stories positive in tone, 35 percent mixed, and 29 percent negative.

So do these numbers reveal a pro-Obama bias? Not necessarily, according to the study’s authors.

Rather, they say, the statistics “do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begat winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions.”

While McCain left St. Paul, Minn., with mostly positive coverage, Obama started out the same period with mostly negative press. But as things turned in the polls, and especially in articles about detailing the electoral map, Obama’s coverage became more favorable.

Obama’s numbers, in fact, are in line with past presidential candidates around the same time periods in the 2000 and 2004 races. It’s McCain’s coverage that has been extraordinarily negative in tone.

On the vice presidential side, Sarah Palin received three times as much attention as Joe Biden, though the two candidates atop each ticket are again receiving far more attention than their running mate as the campaign has moved into the home stretch.

Coverage of Palin, the study found, went from “quite positive” to “very negative” to “more mixed.” Overall, the six-week breakdown showed 29 percent positive, 39 percent negative and 33 percent neutral.

While Biden has received far less coverage that the other three candidates, the study found the stories about him were “far more negative than Palin’s, and nearly as negative as McCain’s.”

In examining tone, the project’s authors wrote that they took a “cautious and conservative approach,” only judging a story positive or negative if the slant was very clear.