Mitt Romney complained last week of a “vast left-wing conspiracy” in the media, but a study published today revealed the presumptive Republican nominee has enjoyed more positive press coverage than President Obama in recent months.
The Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that negative coverage of Obama outweighed positive coverage in each of 15 weeks between Jan. 2 and April 15. Romney, meanwhile, had six weeks of mostly positive stories and another four in which positive and negative coverage were roughly equal.
In fact, positive stories about the former Massachusetts governor have outnumbered negative ones almost 2-to-1 since the Feb. 28 Michigan primary, which Romney won.
“While Romney gained a secure hold on the nomination on April 10 when [Rick] Santorum ended his campaign, he won the media narrative six weeks earlier, and a major factor was that journalists determined after Michigan that the delegate count had become unavoidable,” the project’s director, Tom Rosenstiel, said in a press release.
Obama was hurt, the study concluded, by steady criticism from the entire Republican field, particularly after an open microphone caught him telling Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” on missile defense after his reelection.
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Click to contact candidates or elected officials about this issue. The president also was connected to negative stories about the possible invalidation of his health care law by the Supreme Court, the sluggish economic recovery, and high gas prices.Reacting to the study’s results, Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt tweeted “What happened to @MittRomney’s ‘vast left wing conspiracy’ fueled by the ‘liberal media?’”
Researchers analyzed the tone and volume of candidate coverage by 52 major news outlets and used computerized analysis of more than 11,000 others.