Think the Media was biased against Bernie Sanders? You were right according to a study by Harvard [View all]

[Triana]

A recently released Harvard study is accusing major print and broadcast media of improperly influencing the presidential primaries in the months leading up to the first contests.

Thomas Patterson, Harvard’s Bradley Professor of Government and the Press, in conjunction with the Shorenstein Center on Media, Public Policy, and Politics, conducted an analysis of eight different cable networks and newspapers and found that media companies devoted an unprecedented amount of coverage to Donald Trump from the start of his campaign, effectively shutting out over a dozen of his competitors. The Shorenstein analysis also learned that the Republican candidates got roughly twice as much media coverage as the Democratic candidates.

Furthermore, the majority of the coverage for Trump was either positive or neutral despite his frequently bigoted and inflammatory statements.

Patterson remarked that the astonishing lack of media attention for Sanders’ campaign undoubtedly left permanent damage on his ability to be competitive in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, as the media’s earliest coverage deemed the Vermont senator a “likely loser.”

Name recognition is a key asset in the early going. Unless poll respondents know of a candidate, they’re not going to choose that candidate. Out of mind translates into out of luck for a presidential hopeful in polls and in news coverage. Nor is name recognition something that can be quickly acquired… even as late as August of 2015, two in five registered Democrats nationally said they’d never heard of Sanders or had heard so little they didn’t have an opinion.

Additionally, most of the media coverage of the Democratic race was about the “horse race” of polling positions for each candidate leading up the first caucuses and primaries rather than the issues they campaigned on. The Shorenstein Center concluded that only 7 percent of the media’s reporting on Bernie Sanders was about his issues, whereas 28 percent of Clinton’s coverage was issue-focused.

THE REST:

http://usuncut.com/politics/harvard-study-media-primaries/