Bush Trailing Reagan in First-Year TV Coverage

President Bush has gotten significantly less television coverage than his predecessor during his first year in office and that coverage is increasingly negative, according to a media-monitoring group.

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research group that monitors television news coverage, said an analysis of the Bush coverage, from his inauguration through Dec. 1, indicates that Bush has received about a third as much television exposure as Ronald Reagan did in the same period of his presidency. The amount of coverage is declining almost weekly and getting significantly more negative, according to Lichter.

Nonetheless, Bush retains high public approval ratings. The latest Washington Post poll, taken Nov. 30-Dec. 4, found the President’s job-approval rate was 62%. While that is considered strong, it is 10 points lower than his rating a month earlier.

Lichter said the lack of correlation between positive media coverage and high poll ratings is strong evidence that the public’s perception of how a President is doing relates only in part to his media image. “A President’s image is not just a result of his media portrayal. It results from a general level of satisfaction with the public,” he said. If the economy is generally strong and “communism is crumbling across the world,” Lichter speculated, the public feels satisfied with presidential performance even if the news media are criticizing it.

According to Lichter’s assessment of about 1,800 reports on Bush and his Administration, the President has been the subject of 574 stories, contrasted to 1,782 for Reagan in the same period. Unlike Reagan’s team, which consciously aimed at a daily television message, Bush’s media aides appear to make no such effort.

Lichter found Bush generally had better report cards on TV for foreign policy and defense expertise than for domestic issues and that by far the heaviest coverage he has received has been in the foreign policy area, particularly relations with the Soviets.

The study also confirmed that the Bush family dog, Millie, has been a media godsend. Millie, the study found, has been mentioned in more television stories than three Cabinet secretaries, Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos, Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter and Veterans Affairs Secretary Edward J. Derwinski.