With thanks to Crawl Across the Ocean:
McGill’s whimsically-named Observatory on Media and Public Policy has released its final reports on how Canada’s major dailies covered the 2006 election campaign. A few interesting points:
- The only leader and party to have a significantly positive or negative slant in the overall coverage? Paul Martin and the Liberals. It netted out to pretty much neutral for the Conservatives, NDP and BQ.
- Compared to vote share in 2004 and 2006, the Liberals were significantly over-represented in “first mentions” – that is, stories where they were the the first party mentioned. Ditto Martin and Stephen Harper for first mentions of leaders. Jack Layton and the NDP were underreported, while the BQ was pretty close to its vote share.
- The big media bias? They’re pro-horse race stories. 44 per cent of the articles the dailies ran were about who was ahead, who had the Big Mo, who was trailing, and the myriad other ways of spinning the same substance-free story. Issue-based stories barely edged them out, accounting for 48 per cent of the articles.
You can also check out the 2004 study at the same location.
