For the top Democratic candidates, the difference was even more striking: Barack Obama received coverage that was 70 percent positive and 9 percent negative, and Hillary Clinton's was 61 percent positive and 13 percent negative. On the other hand, only 26 percent of the stories on Republican candidates were positive and 40 percent negative.
You can cite statistics like that until the cows come home, but it goes right over people's heads because we have all been brainwashed with the propaganda that journalism is objective - and people just don't see why journalism should be slanted, or why journalism should be all slanting the same way.There are reasons, actually pretty simple reasons, why this is the case. First, "Why would the various newspapers and broadcast networks be unified?" The answer to that is that newspapers in the founding era were diverse, and they did not have efficient means of gathering news which the rest of the population did not hear first from other sources. That changed with "the wire" - the (1848) advent of the Associated Press. The AP succeeded in monopolizing the transmission of news by telegraph - and when its monopoly was questioned on the grounds that it produced a concentration of propaganda power, the AP sold the story that the AP was "objective."
The AP transformed the newspaper business into a true news business delivering information which was not otherwise available to the general public. But, all protestations of objectivity notwithstanding, the Associated Press has one inherent bias: that the news - simply because it is new and known first by the AP - is important. What if the news wasn't important?
The reality is that on a typical day you probably cannot remember anything in the newspaper from exactly 5 years ago. There is only so much going on that is actually important, and reported daily developments ordinarily are of no enduring significance. And that means that the Associated Press in general, and the journalistic outlets which it supplies in particular, are inherently superficial. They are also generally negative, because the most dramatic changes are typically negative changes - simply because it is more dramatic to realize that a house burned down in less than a day than it is to understand that the nation's building contractors finish new houses every day, too. But there is less drama in the completion of ten months-long house construction projects than there is in the surprise demolition of the fruits of one such project.
In addition, since journalism is simply talk, journalism has an inherent tendency to promote criticism at the expense of action - to denigrate and second guess the businessman, the policeman, and the soldier. And to puff up the teacher, the plaintiff lawyer, the union leader, and the second-guessing politician by assigning them the favorable label of "progressive."