Four Campaigns, Eight Conventions...But Just One Spin
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Sixteen years ago, a research team led by George Washington University Professor William C. Adams conducted the first exhaustive examination of the networks’ prime time convention coverage. As Adams later wrote in the December/January 1985 issue of Public Opinion magazine, one reason for studying the networks’ prime time coverage, was that "network news directors have complained that media analysts confine their research to the few seconds [of political news] that appear on the nightly news and ignore ‘what we do when we have more time.’ With two to four hours airing each night, conventions provide an excellent opportunity to examine how network reporters conveyed key political battles of American politics in 1984," wrote Adams.
Much has changed since those words were written — with the rise of 24-hour cable news networks like CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, the broadcast networks no longer offer "two to four hours" of nightly coverage, for example. But much also remains the same. Although they’re no longer decisive in determining presidential nominees (and haven’t been for at least 30 years), national conventions remain crucial events for introducing the candidates to the public and informing voters about the essential elements of a party’s platform. Conventions matter: the 1988 Republican convention vaulted then-Vice President George Bush to front-runner status over Michael Dukakis, while four years later the Democratic convention propelled Bill Clinton into a permanent lead over Bush.
The media’s liberal bias has been well-documented by numerous surveys of journalists and countless studies of news coverage, many performed by analysts working for the Media Research Center (MRC). Despite this bias, however, at convention time every four years, conservatives have known they could directly reach the public with their message. While the media as a group have never been sympathetic to the conservative point of view, professional journalists understood that their coverage was never complete and accurate without its inclusion.
In 1984, Professor Adams found that the networks provided unequal treatment of the two conventions. Correspondents frequently labeled Republican politicians as ideologues, using labels such as "conservative," "right wing" and "far right" much more than they called Democrats "liberal," "left wing" and "far left." In on-air interviews, reporters frequently challenged Republicans with questions drawn from the liberal agenda, but rarely challenged Democrats with conservative questions. "Does healthy adversarial journalism require minimizing topics that are inconvenient for the underdogs?" asked Adams.
Since 1988, the MRC has applied Adams’s methodology to the networks’ prime time convention coverage. Adams only had enough resources to examine CBS and NBC’s coverage. Fortunately, MRC was able to include ABC and CNN in their studies as well, making them the most complete investigations of convention news ever conducted. Over the course of the past 12 years, more than a dozen MRC analysts scrutinized over 100 hours of prime time programming, painstakingly proving that what Bill Adams found in 1984 wasn’t just a one-time fluke — over the past four campaigns, the networks have consistently been tougher on Republicans than Democrats.
The MRC studies examined three main subject areas: agenda of questions posed, use of labels, and coverage of political controversies.
