From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Amid the general atmosphere of political gridlock and economic dread,

the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the media coverage of the current crop of presidential contenders and found,

sit down, that the president's coverage is

overwhelmingly negative. And by overwhelming, I mean that when looking at 11,500 news outlets

over the previous five months, Pew found that Obama's negative coverage outstripped the

positive by nearly four to one. Mark Jerkowitz is the

associate director for the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Mark, welcome back to the show.

Thanks very much. How do you measure positive and negative press? Because you're talking about

news coverage as much as editorial and opinion. Yes, we are. And this is kind of a new research tool

for us. It was a computer algorithm developed by a company called Crimson Hexagon. And we actually

used our own human researchers and coders to train the computer, basically, to look for positive, negative, and neutral assertions.

Our sample was over 11,000 different media outlets.

So how do you account for this overwhelmingly negative coverage of the president?

This was like 9% positive versus what? 34% negative.

When we first looked at the numbers, Brooke, it surprised us too.

But then when you start to actually understand sort of the structure of the coverage, it makes more sense.

And here's what we found.

We're talking about 7, 8, 9 Republican candidates out there now in the news every single day.

They're debating frequently.

And all of them, to one degree or another, are constantly critical of the president.

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