PEJ Survey: Voters Convinced Media Supports Obama
Project for Excellence in Journalism's weekly news interest index survey shows that likely voters believe the media favors Demcoratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/23/2008 7:19:00 AM
The majority of voters are convinced that the media want Barack Obama to be the next president. That is according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's weekly news interest index survey.
According to a poll of likely voters, 70% say they think the media favors Obama, while only 9% say McCain.
It is no surprise that journalists are believed to favor Democrats. That has been the case by wide margins since the poll was started in 1992, but the spread is the largest ever, topping the 59% to 17% difference in 1996 between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.
And in 2004, only 50% of likely voters thought the media favored John Kerry, to 22% saying they favored George W. Bush.
When the voters are broken out by party, the feeling of Republicans is almost unanimous (90%) that the media favors the Democrat, but 62% of Democrats and independents say the same thing.
That result follows one by PEJ that found that there were three times as many negative stories about McCain as positive in the last six weeks.
The study also found that 33% of respondents said that their view of Obama had become more favorable, while 23% said it had become less so. McCain's was the opposite, with 34% saying their opinion had become more negative, while 24% said it had become more favorable.
The survey was conducted Oct. 17-20 by Opinion Research Corp., which polled 1,000 adults 18-plus, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5%, with a larger margin for the "likely voters" subgroup.
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