Obama and the Media

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with The State of the News Media 2010, and one finding may not be surprising:

The partisan gap that showed itself during the 2008 election season continued into 2009, at least when it came to cable’s coverage of the new Obama administration. A PEJ study of the first 100 days found that the majority of Obama stories on Fox were clearly negative in tone. It was the only outlet studied where that was the case. On MSNBC, the majority of stories were clearly positive in tone. It was the only outlet studied other than Newsweek where that was the case. In that respect, the two channels offered divergent images of Obama. CNN, meanwhile, mirrored the rest of the mainstream news media in the tone of its coverage