Obama Gets More Negative Press Than Any GOP Candidate

For the last few months the approval rating of President Obama's job performance has been falling, and currently rests somewhere around 40%. I have not agreed with everything the president has done myself, but I think it is a little strange that his job approval is not better, especially since none of the Republicans in Congress or the GOP presidential candidates have any kind of real solution for the economic problems facing this country. But the reason becomes a little clearer now that a new survey about news coverage has been released.

The Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has just released a new survey. They studied the news coverage for President Obama and all of the Republican presidential candidates from May 2nd through October 9th of this year. Here is what they discovered about the president's news coverage:

"One man running for president has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment of all, the study found: Barack Obama. Though covered largely as president rather than a candidate,  negative assessments of Obama have outweighed positive by a ration of almost 4-1. Those assessments of the president have also been substantially more negative than positive every one of the 23 weeks studied. And in no week during these five months was more than 10% of the coverage about the president positive in tone."

Now it starts to make sense. How can the people have a positive view of the president when virtually all they hear from the media about him is negative? That makes me wonder if this slanted and largely negative coverage of the president will have more to do with who gets elected than the actual issues. The Republicans probably hope so since the public generally disagrees with them on nearly all the issues -- especially jobs and the economy.

Here is what the study showed about the news coverage of all the candidates (broken down into positive, neutral, and negative coverage):

RICK PERRY
positive..........32%
neutral..........48%
negative..........20%

SARAH PALIN
positive..........31%
neutral..........47%
negative..........22%

MICHELE BACHMANN
positive..........31%
neutral..........46%
negative..........23%

HERMAN CAIN
positive..........28%
neutral..........49%
negative..........23%

MITT ROMNEY
positive..........26%
neutral..........47%
negative..........27%

RICK SANTORUM
positive..........23%
neutral..........51%
negative..........26%

RON PAUL
positive..........21%
neutral..........62%
negative..........17%

JON HUNTSMAN
positive..........21%
neutral..........62%
negative..........17%

NEWT GINGRICH
positive..........15%
neutral..........50%
negative..........35%

BARACK OBAMA
positive..........9%
neutral..........57%
negative..........34%

The news media needs to do a better job than that. There's a big difference between simply reporting the news and slanting it either positively or negatively.