Most Say Election Coverage Is Fair, Survey Finds : Media: Times Mirror interviews indicate most voters believe reporters personally prefer Clinton. But majority also think news does not show bias.

American voters think reporters overwhelmingly prefer that Bill Clinton be elected President, but they nonetheless believe by an even greater margin that the press has been fair in its coverage of the two presidential candidates, according to a new survey to be released today.

The survey by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press also found that many voters blame the media for having too much influence over the presidential election and believe it has been too critical in delving into candidates’ personal lives.

The survey, which interviewed 1,508 adults Sept. 10-13, was conducted by the Times Mirror Center to examine the role of the press in this election. Times Mirror owns the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun and other newspapers and publishing concerns. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points; the results are also subject to bias from the wording of the questions.

Fifty-two percent of those surveyed believe most reporters favor Clinton, while only 17% believe journalists want to see Bush win, the poll found. Twenty-six percent are unsure.

But the public is more evenly divided over whether reporters’ personal biases regularly influence the way they report the news. Forty-nine percent said they believe journalists’ political preferences sway their reporting, while 47% say that is true only sometimes or seldom.

There were other indications that the public trusted the information they received about the campaign. An overwhelming 71% thought the press had been fair in its coverage of Bush, while 74% thought the press was fair in its coverage of Clinton.

The survey also found that a significant number of people thought the press had been “too personally critical” of the candidates, but that too was statistically identical for both parties. Forty-one percent thought the press had been too critical in personal matters involving Bush, while 42% thought so of Clinton. Those numbers are up from Times Mirror’s survey in 1988, when only 33% thought the press had been too personally critical of Bush, and 37% thought that was true of the Democratic nominee, Michael S. Dukakis.

Nonetheless, a small majority, 53% in the case of Bush and 52% in the case of Clinton, felt the press has not been too critical, despite controversies earlier this year over whether the media should have reported allegations of marital infidelity involving both men.

The same survey also found that Americans last month were far more interested in news of Hurricane Andrew than they were of either the economy or the campaign. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they were following the hurricane story “very closely,” while 43% were following the news of the economy as closely and 42% were paying very close attention to news of the election. The level is essentially the same as in 1988.

Despite heavy news coverage, however, only 20% could correctly identify the Serbs as the ethnic group that now controls much of the former Yugoslavia.