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Pew: MSNBC more negative than Fox News

MSNBC has long been thought of as the left's answer to Fox News, but that may be an understatement.

From August 27 through October 21, 71 percent of MSNBC's coverage of Mitt Romney this year was negative, far outperforming Fox News's negative coverage of President Barack Obama, which came in at 46 percent, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The negative-to-positive ratio on MSNBC was roughly 23-to-1; the negative-to-positive ratio on Fox News was 8-to-1.

Those findings are part of PEJ's larger survey on the tone of news coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign. Both Obama and Romney received more negative than positive coverage, according to the survey. In the Aug. 27 - Oct. 21 period, 19 percent of stories about Obama were favorable in tone while 30 percent were unfavorable. Fifteen percent of the stories about Romney were favorable, while 38 percent were unfavorable. Romney received more negative press prior to the Oct. 3 debate (and following the infamous "47 percent" video), Obama received more negative coverage after the Oct. 3 debate.

But taken as a whole, the mainstream media was far less negative than social media. On Twitter and Facebook, 45 percent and 53 percent of the coverage of President Obama was negative, respectively. On those same platforms, 58 and 62 percent of the coverage of Romney was negative.