James Fallows has an interesting blog post on The Atlantic Monthly‘s website on the relative tone of political coverage of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. After showing some charts of data on press coverage collected by the Pew Center research, Fallows offers this succinct summary:

Main point: At no time in the past year has coverage of President Obama been as positive as that of Governor Romney. Indeed, at no time in the past year has it been on-balance positive at all.

You can argue that negative coverage of the administration is justified. You can argue that incumbents are — and should be — held to a tougher standard, since they have a record to defend. But you can’t sanely argue that the press is in the tank for Obama, notwithstanding recent “false equivalence” attempts to do so.

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