TW: I have mentioned before my firm belief that media is biased not ideologically but towards whatever means generates the most profit. This piece contradicts me suggesting the Republicans have enjoyed the favorable bias. I would say at a minimum it supports the notion that the Republicans are just very good a crying wolf about alleged liberal bias.
From Bloomington Herald Times:
"[Researchers at Indiana University have concluded] that network television news coverage from 1992-2004 favored Republicans over Democrats.
The Republican advantage has been demonstrated before, by different researchers over different time periods, despite the constant howling about a liberal media bias.
What the Indiana University telecommunications professors have done is look at “the microdetail of news broadcasts"
...“There is absolutely no doubt the Republicans are brilliant in handling images,” Grabe said. “I don’t know if the Democrats just suffer from low metabolism or what precisely it is, but they’re not as aggressive and not as smart about image handling.”
The researchers examined 62 hours of major network news broadcasts during the presidential campaigns of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004. Instead of simply measuring the volume of time spent on candidate coverage, they looked at the camera angles, shot lengths, who had the last say and other positive and negative components of visual imagery — television’s stock in trade.
They documented straight-on camera shots (neutral), low angle shots, which make a candidate look bigger and more powerful (positive) and high angle shots that make a candidate look smaller and weaker (negative). They counted “lip flap shots” in which narration goes over the image of a candidate speaking (negative) and “the Goldilocks effect” in which one candidate gets the last say and is better and more favorably seen by viewers.
In every campaign, Republican candidates came out with the most favorable coverage. Some campaigns were striking in the tilt in favor of the GOP.
For example, in 1992, Republicans got the final word in news segments 57.9 percent of the time. In 1996, the Republican candidate, Bob Dole, enjoyed the positive, Goldilocks effect eight times more than the Democrat, Bill Clinton.
As their publisher, the Oxford University Press, puts it: “The book draws from a variety of disciplines, including political science, behavioral biology, cognitive neuroscience and media studies to investigate the visual framing of elections in an incisive, fresh and interdisciplinary fashion.”
“The brain is very much wired to have an automatic response to images, especially when they’re colorful,” Grabe said. “The way the brain is wired, if you trust the cognitive scientists who do brain scans, is that the brain is not very specialized for the written or oral processing of words, but it’s supremely wired for image processing, and that’s why images are so powerful.”
It goes far beyond just camera angles and who got the last word, however. Grabe said Republicans have been superb in portraying candidates such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as populists, while the Democrats have been miserable at it.
“Look at 2000 and 2004,” Grabe said. “Karl Rove was very good at putting Bush in the position of being the regular guy of the regular people — a guy you’d be comfortable having a beer with, a guy comfortable clearing brush and using a chainsaw.
“On the Democratic side you had Gore and Kerry, two blue-blooded, brainy, nerdy guys who were utterly uncomfortable in the populist mode, doing things like wearing jeans and catching footballs on the airport tarmac,” she went on. “That was not their strong suit; they were uncomfortable, and it showed.”
...The researchers don’t give their peers in either print or broadcast news a pass for allowing themselves to be manipulated by Republican strategists. “We’re not saying that producers of broadcasts news are necessarily biased,” said Bucy. “But it’s been a time-honored tactic to continually complain about liberal bias. At some point, people get so tired of the criticism that they overcompensate.”
Grabe said former Republican National Chairman, Rich Bond, once used a sports analogy to explain the technique. “He said if you look at any good sports coaches, you will see that they constantly beat up on the refs, knowing that sooner or later, the refs will cut you some slack. That’s been the admitted strategy for some time, and it works.”
...“People tend to overestimate how much people rely on cable news stations,” Grabe said. “Their audience, all stations combined, is smaller, or close to equal to one major network.”
She went on to point out that a recent Pew study found that 68 percent of Americans rely on television for their political news.
“A lot of people want to downgrade television news and often completely exclude television as an information source,” Grabe said. “Well, 23 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate. Give them an Advil pill bottle, and they can’t read the instructions. So it becomes a bit of an elitist position, and, perhaps, an inaccurate analysis, to ignore the power of network news.”
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