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This study pulls together two separate lines of research — sound bite research and news bias research — within a single Campaign ′92 network TV news study. Presidential and vice presidential campaign stories that appeared on network television were analyzed in terms of categories of biters and types of bites. Results indicated that the twenty-year trend of shrinking sound bites has stopped. Contrary to statements made by some members of the working press, there was no evidence of liberal news bias in the network selection of bites by the candidates themselves. However, the analysis of bites by noncandidates did produce results consistent with a hypothesis of liberal news bias. The Bush-Quayle ticket was negatively bitten almost twice as much as the Clinton-Gore ticket and more than three times as much as the Perot-Stockdale ticket.
Lowry et al. (Wed,) studied this question.