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This book analyzes the coverage of the 1972 presidential election campaign by the three major television networks, focusing on weekday-evening news broadcasts from 10 July to 6 November 1972. The study's two objectives are to identify and explain discernible patterns of campaign news coverage and to show how these patterns relate to the candidates, issues, parties, and campaign activities, how they relate to each of the networks, and how they persist or vary as the campaign progresses. Chapter topics include considerations for the study's design; individual network coverage of the candidates, the issues, and the political parties during the 1972 campaign; ratings and themes as alternative techniques of analysis; specific issues and sources in news coverage; and conclusions from the study. Thirty-six tables of data illustrate the text. (RL)

The television networks nightly news coverage of the 1972 Presidential campaign was examined between July 10 and November 6, 1972 to assess the nature and impact of political bias in news coverage. The campaign news coverage of two newspapers and one wire service was also compared with respect to the content and length of each medium's news about the candidates, parties, and political issues to discern differences in the ways that the three media handled their news reports of the campaign. The types of bias investigated were those involved in the news selection process: whether the news was selected because of the peculiar characteristics of the medium (structural bias); because of influence by particular situations, such as political issues (situational bias); or because of the political prejudices of news personnel (political or partisan bias). The analysis showed that structural bias was clearly evident in much of the coverage; newspapers provided greater depth and included greater complexity in their campaign stories, while television news was biased toward visually exciting campaign events easily covered by film crews. No clear evidence, however, was found to suggest that the news coverage by any medium was situationally or politically biased. (RL)