Bernama led 'media attack' on Pakatan in GE13
National news agency Bernama was the BN's biggest ally in the media during the 13th general election, ‘attacking’ Pakatan Rakyat in 92.86 percent of its reports by mentioning it in a negative way.
National news agency Bernama was the BN's biggest ally in the media during the 13th general election, ‘attacking’ Pakatan Rakyat in 92.86 percent of its reports by mentioning it in a negative way.
This was the highest among the print, online and broadcast media studied by the University of Nottingham and Centre of Independent Journalism from April 7 to May 7, 2013.
The month-long research also found that for every Bernama report that was positive for the BN, “Pakatan got 0.045 items”.
“This is a huge amount of inequality," noted University of Nottingham lecturer Tessa Houghton (centre in photo) while presenting the research at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia today.
She said that, contrary to claims by some bloggers, MCA-owned The Star was also mostly negative towards Pakatan over the period studied.
"(In Star) 85.29 percent of the (reports) were negative to Pakatan, while 88.68 percent were positive to the BN," she said.
According to the study, the English-language print media in the peninsula had closely trailed Bernama, with Pakatan attacked in 90.29 percent of the reports via negative mentions.
The federal opposition coalition was also attacked in 87.25 percent of reports in the Malay-language newspapers in the peninsula.
The English-language newspapers studied were The Star, TheSun and New Straits Times, while the Malay newspapers were Utusan Malaysia, Sinar Harian and Harian Metro.
According to Houghton, only about 3 percent of the Bernama reports studied by some 70 coders nationwide had Pakatan members as sources. The bulk of articles were sourced from BN representatives.
TV news better, but not by much
Television broadcasts in English, Bahasa Malaysia and Mandarin did better than Bernama in terms of being balanced, but not by much.
There were roughly six times more positive stories about the BN on Bahasa Malaysia television news compared to Pakatan, while English-language broadcasts were slightly more equal.
On Mandarin television news, for every three stories positive about the BN, there was one positive story on Pakatan.
The television news broadcasts studied were NTV7 Edition 7, TV2 English news, TV3 Buletin Utama, TV1 Berita Nasional, TV2 Berita Mandarin and 8TV Mandarin news.
Houghton said that online media and the Mandarin peninsula print media were found to be more equitable both in volume of coverage and tone. 
In the online media analysed - Malaysiakini and The Malaysian Insider - the BN and Pakatan were found to have been given almost equal coverage.
In terms of tone, the Bahasa Malaysia pages of these online media carried slightly more articles favourable to Pakatan compared to the English pages.
However, contrary to popular belief, the study found that both the English and Bahasa Malaysia editions published more positive articles about the BN than it did about Pakatan.
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