Sidebar: Yet ANOTHER Reason for More Republican Fact-checking

And Another Reason I don't believe in the "Liberal Media"

(AND Things You won't see at those Anti-PolitiFact Blog Sites)

As soon as I posted "Another Reason For More Republican Fact-checking" the other day, I got yet another fine surprise from the Daily Beast (via Yahoo News) as a follow-up: yet another study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which reported:

During the bruising Republican primaries, there was one candidate whose coverage was more relentlessly negative than the rest. In fact, he did not enjoy a single week where positive treatment by the media outweighed the negative.

His name is Barack Obama.

That is among the findings of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington nonprofit that examined 52 key newspaper, television, radio, and Web outlets.

“Day in and day out, he was criticized by the entire Republican field on a variety of policies,” Mark Jurkowitz, the group’s associate director, says of Obama. “And he was inextricably linked to events that generated negative coverage”—including rising gas prices, the ailing economy, and the renewed debate over his health care law.

In short, while the president was being hammered on both fronts, his message was somewhat drowned out by the volume of news coverage surrounding the GOP candidates.

As my recent Politi-Score analysis of Mitt Romney's rulings revealed, many of his statements concentrated on "hammering" Obama and his policies as noted in the above quote, with the end result of bringing down his overall "truthfulness."   The study also evidences the reality of there being so many of these type of  "Candidate Bio" (Obama) statements being checked.  And it doesn't seem that PolitiFact's "setting the record straight" with many of the claims it found misleading and false (as well as the other fact-checkers) had much effect.

Overall, it was no contest. From Jan. 2 through April 15, Romney’s coverage was 39 percent positive, 32 percent negative, and 29 percent neutral, the researchers found. Obama’s coverage was 18 percent positive, 34 percent negative, and 34 percent neutral. That means Romney’s depiction by the media was more than twice as positive as the president’s. So much for liberal bias.

So, consider this the next time you see those signs that say "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" often seen at some of the Republican presidential campaign events.  Because if the coverage of Obama has been found to be so negative, maybe those sign-holders are doing themselves a dis-service, because by extension they're telling anyone (i.e., swing-voters) reading the sign that what the media says about Obama is probably NOT true.