Media Matters

(Fox News) - The news media focus on presidential horse race stories over actual issues by about a seven-to-one margin. It's a complaint heard every four years — and backed up again this year in a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard University.

It also reports some interesting results about bias in TV reporting. It says Democrats received more total coverage than Republicans — and more positive coverage. Republicans got more negative coverage.

The survey found that stories on the FOX News Channel which tilted positive or negative favored Republicans over Democrats — but that most FOX stories were neutral — favoring neither party. It concludes — "any sense here that (FOX) was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data."