Elections/Campaigns

The tone of the press coverage of the debates in 2004 was highly negative for Presidential Bush. Nearly 60% of the stories were critical of the President, more than twice the percentage for challenger John Kerry.

In print, the impact of the debates on the horse race was still a dominant theme, but regional papers were more likely to simply report what the candidates said than national papers were, and other themes got more attention than they did on television.

Nearly seven out of ten newspaper stories about Bush’s debate performance were negative, compared with three out of ten about Kerry. This was similar to what people saw on television. 

As in print, most of the stories on network TV about the presidential debates in 2004 were about both candidates, not focused on one or the other.

The tone of all media stories both about Gore and those focused more on Bush tended to be negative in 2000, but Gore’s coverage was more so. Bush stories were also nearly twice as likely to be positive as were those about Gore.

On network news, how the debates might impact the horse race overwhelmed any other theme coming out of the event.

Different online news sites approached covering the debates of 2004 differently, but of the major ones, only MSNBC had a significant number of original bylined stories.

Bloggers, like traditional media, focused heavily on the impact of the debates on the horse race, but they were also much more likely to discuss policy and candidate fitness.

Most of the newspaper stories of the presidential debates focused on both candidates. 

Newspapers framed stories that focused on Bush in the debates on how they affected his standing in the horse race. Stories about Kerry were just as likely, in contrast, to be straight forward news accounts of what was said.