BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. It's become almost trite to observe that TV coverage of election campaigns obsesses on the horserace to the exclusion of the underlying issues, but a new study by MediaChannel.org quantifies the substance gap. Using data compiled in January by the monitoring firm Media Tenor, MediaChannel concluded that the three major network news divisions devoted less than 5 percent of their campaign coverage to the 5 issues voters say matter most -- the economy, the war on terror, health care, education and taxes. The same study found that candidates deemed marginal by the networks received virtually no coverage, and that President Bush, long gingerly treated, has been hit with a sudden barrage of negative coverage. MediaChannel executive director Timothy Carr joins me now. Tim, welcome to OTM.

TIMOTHY CARR: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Well I'm curious about your methodology on a, on a couple of fronts, but let's talk about the 5 percent figure. If, for example, there is a story about whether John Edwards is making headway on John Kerry, and the sound bite of John Edwards is him talking about fair trade versus free trade, in essence articulating his anti-Nafta policy, doesn't that count or shouldn't that count as policy coverage, even if it's in the context of a piece on the horserace?

TIMOTHY CARR: In fact, it does. We look at all statements, and we rank them according to what is said, so if in fact John Edwards refers to fair trade, we then register that as a statement about economic issues.

BOB GARFIELD: How do you determine what is negative or positive or neutral and who is making that determination?

TIMOTHY CARR:There are analysts who pore over transcripts and actually watch the broadcasts -- they tape the broadcasts. And they will look at a story and make a determination that is qualitative whether it is positive, negative or neutral towards a candidate. So what we've seen in the last two months that we've been analyzing this coverage is that there has been a turn towards more negative coverage of George Bush, and this is not that the networks are giving negative bias to the stories as much as it is that they're presenting stories such as Bush's position on WMD, the problem with intelligence there, the somewhat flat reception to his State of the Union address, the brouhaha surrounding his service during the '70s, his military service, and they'll look at stories like that and they'll rank them as negative, but these rankings don't reflect bias. They really reflect the choice of news items.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, I want to ask you about that, because in the MediaChannel pieces that you've done, analyzing the research as it's come in, it seemed to me that you equated an increase in the number of so-called "negative references," at CBS, for example, concerning President Bush with the network's attitude toward Bush, as if someone had said okay, it's, it's time to go negative. But that, that's not how news organizations operate.

TIMOTHY CARR: That's not how they present themselves, certainly, but it, it's interesting to note that at a time when CBS News was under fire for alleged right wing bias in its decision to kill a program called The Reagans, its decision to reject advocacy campaigns during the Super Bowl, they have come under heavy fire from progressives and the left for allegedly supporting a right wing point of view at the same time you see a very decided shift in the coverage of the CBS Evening News Program towards negative, and, and they in fact came out to be more negative in their coverage of Bush than both ABC and NBC. The data presents an interesting phenomenon that deserves further coverage.

BOB GARFIELD:Isn't it more likely that the CBS News operation not only acts essentially independently of any corporate bias but that it's just reacting to the news concerning the president?

TIMOTHY CARR: That's true. However, it's difficult to say, you know, what influenced these organizations or how they came to the decision to present more negative or more positive stories.

BOB GARFIELD:I noticed a kind of paradox in your data. It turns out that the, the candidates who got the least attention got the most light shone on their policy decisions.

TIMOTHY CARR: The most positive light.

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. Kucinich and Joseph Lieberman and Carol Moseley-Braun, who are two who are now out of the race, got quite a bit of favorable coverage for their policy positions while Edwards and Kerry lagged at the very bottom. How do you account for that?

TIMOTHY CARR: Well the coverage that they did receive was rather minuscule by comparison to the coverage early on that Dean received and that Kerry is now receiving, and it tended, whenever they would mention these lesser candidates, to portray their issue positions. But we're looking at candidates that garnered in some cases less than 1 percent of the coverage against Bush, against Dean, against Kerry who are receiving upwards of 30 percent of the news coverage of election information. And unless they can raise significant amount of money, it removes them from the media mix.

BOB GARFIELD:The state of democracy in the United States in 2004 is such that the game is stacked in favor of those who have the war chests to underwrite a long and grueling campaign. Should the national broadcast media ignore that political reality? Or are you suggesting that they should unilaterally try to change the political reality by devoting news resources and air time to those who haven't a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting elected?

TIMOTHY CARR: Well, I, I don't think it's the, the media's responsibility to make these decisions. I think real-- ultimately it's the public's responsibility, and what we're trying to do at Media for Democracy is empower the public to pressure the media to do better. Yes, money and media are powerful ingredients in deciding who ultimately will win the election, and the media is the recipient of campaign money. The majority of campaign money goes to local broadcast affiliates to buy these 30 second political ads. This is a system that has excluded the voters from the process, and we're trying to bring them back into this.

BOB GARFIELD: Tim, thanks so much for joining us.

TIMOTHY CARR: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Timothy Carr is the executive director of MediaChannel, a media watchdog group based in New York City. [MUSIC]