Tracking Negativity

In tracking the Washington Post themes, I wanted to know which politicians were receiving the most negative coverage, and when they were receiving it. I post my results with this caveat: Tracking negativity can be subjective. If a column stated that a candidate was either fundamentally flawed, or employing a bad strategy, I charted it as “Negative.” This was tricky in the case of Eugene Robinson, who wrote a few columns that stated the Democrats were erring in not attacking McCain. Who is getting the real criticism, here? In the case of Eugene, I made the call not to count the articles as negative coverage. Grey areas were no obstacle in the case of Bob Novak, who wrote a whopping 6 clearly negative pieces on Barack Obama. Same goes for Charles Krauthammer, who wrote 5 negative Obama screeds.

Overall, I recorded 17 negative Hillary Clinton pieces, 30 negative Barack Obama pieces, and 11 negative John McCain pieces. The last two weeks of February saw 7 negative pieces, easily her negative coverage peak in my sample. Over that same time period, Obama only recieved 2 such pieces, and McCain had 3. Obama got hit worst around the time of the Pennslyvannia primary (held April 22nd). From April 14 to April 25, Obama tallied 8 negative columns. Obama saw a second apogee in the return of Wright coverage (5 such columns from May 1-6). The second peak is very interesting because I found no sinking poll numbers that correlated with the negativity (Rasmussen has Obama gaining 6 points on Hillary during this time period, as does Gallup). With only 11 negative pieces, McCain has not really had “peaks,” but he did tally 3 attacks from 4/22 to 4/27. His poll numbers have been somewhat stagnant over the course of my research. Currently, Clinton is losing ground to him and Obama is gaining.

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