Study: Bill Clinton Was Kinda Right, Media Is Obsessed With Horse-Race And Is Toughest On Hillary
December 26, 2007 -- 3:57 PM EST // //

In recent weeks Bill Clinton has made headlines by making a handful of pronouncements about media coverage of Campaign 2008. On Charlie Rose's show, for instance, he suggested that Hillary was getting a tougher ride from the press than her rivals. And at a campaign stop he complained that the press was obsessed with horse-race coverage at the expense of issues.

Both these assertions were met by pundits with the sort of mockery that might have greeted Bill if he'd predicted that a fleet of spaceships from Mars would be shipping in thousands of alien voters to put her over the top in Iowa. MSNBC's Steve Adubato chortled that in fact Hillary had been a "major media darling" throughout the race. Chris Matthews suggested Bill was delusional and hit him for denying "the undeniable." Tucker lampooned Bill for hypocrisy.

Well, now a new study has come out that concludes that in both cases, Bill was at least party right.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., took a look at 481 news stories on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX from October 1 through December 15, 2007. It concluded that the media hits Hillary the hardest:

TV election news has been hardest on Hillary Clinton this fall, while Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have been the biggest media favorites, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University...

On-air evaluations of Hillary Clinton were nearly 3 to 2 negative (42% positive vs. 58% negative comments), while evaluations of her closest competitor Barack Obama was better than 3 to 2 positive (61% positive vs. 39% negative). John Edwards attracted much less coverage, but his evaluations were 2 to 1 positive (67% positive vs. 33% negative). Sen. Clinton was evaluated more often than all her Democratic opponents combined.

Meanwhile, check out these numbers from the study on the proportion of stories that was done on the political, as opposed to policy, dimensions of Hillary's candidacy:

Clinton campaign's strategy and tactics, 47 stories;

Her electability, 18 stories;

Her alleged policy flip-flops, 14 stories;

Her honesty/integrity, 12 stories

Obviously one needs to be cautious about reaching overall conclusions based on this sort of stuff. The pool of news orgs and the time period selected here both feel somewhat arbitrary and are of course tiny compared to the overall roar of campaign coverage. The designation of stories as "positive" or "negative" doesn't feel all that scientific, either. What's more, Bill obviously has his own political reasons for making these criticisms at this particular moment.

Still, there's at least a bit of statistical evidence here that Bill's claims aren't all that wild-eyed after all and just may have at least some basis in reality.

I'm bringing this up for a reason. As regular readers know, this blog has done a lot of hitting back at bogus media coverage of Closet Muslim Barack Obama and Haircut-Hypocrite John Edwards. But inevitably there have been more posts here about Hillary than the others. The reason for this isn't sneaking pro-Hillary bias. It simply reflects the apparent reality that overall there's just more media nonsense directed Hillary's way. This study provides a bit more evidence that this is the case.

At any rate, no doubt Chris Matthews and Tucker will be all over this study any day now.

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