The purpose of this study was to find out if either The New York Times or The Washington Times participated in unbalanced media coverage during the last two weeks of the 2004 Presidential Election. Through content analysis paragraph tone was used to evaluate news stories, columns, and editorials as positive, negative or neutral from a composite week sample.
Scholars, politicians, the public as well as journalists have long argued about the existence or not of media bias and whether it is in support of liberal or conservative politics. This study was not an attempt to pick a side in that confrontation. Instead, a goal of this research was to provide additional data along with testing methodology, in the hope that it would contribute to the work that has already been accomplished in moving toward evaluation criteria for identifying media bias.
The findings from this study provided evidence of unbalanced media coverage from both news organizations during the particular period of study. The biggest surprise was that The Washington Times was more unbalanced than The New York Times, 64.9% to 56.3%.
Data from this study supports the previous research that claims a presence of liberal bias as well as a possible attempt by conservative elites to create and support a perception of media bias. The evidence uncovered also supports agenda setting and priming as well as some agenda setting effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04032006-214922 |
| Date | 04 April 2006 |
| Creators | Cummings, Jr., Jimmie E. |
| Contributors | Judith L. Sylvester, Louis A. Day, Robert Kirby Goidel |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04032006-214922/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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