Just because the Conservatives are paranoid about reporters doesn't mean the media isn't out to get them.

An analysis of newspaper coverage in the opening days of this campaign concludes Stephen Harper received the most negative coverage of the four main party leaders, even more negative than the coverage he got in the disastrous final week of the 2004 election.

Initial coverage of Paul Martin was not only less negative, it was more positive than the waning days of the last campaign, when the Prime Minister rebounded to pull out his narrow victory. "The findings are rather striking," said Stuart Soroka, co-director of McGill University's Observatory on Media and Public Policy(OMPP), which conducted the analysis. "Martin has been doing progressively better in the media over time and Harper has been doing progressively worse."

Soroka pointed out that the initial findings reflect coverage that tended to rehash conventional wisdom on the parties and leaders as they entered the campaign. That would include criticism of Harper as an angry politician with a hidden agenda of social conservatism -- an image the Liberals exploited in 2004. Choosing to kick off this campaign with a promise to re-open the same-sex marriage debate prompted more such coverage. Despite heavy emphasis on Liberal party corruption in the opening days, Martin appears to have benefited from the fact that he was personally exonerated by Justice John Gomery's inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.

The analysis is the first stage of the OMPP's 2006 Federal Election Newspaper Analysis project, to be carried in Maclean's throughout the campaign. It found New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton received the most positive coverage of all the leaders in the opening days. Still, Soroka cautioned against reading too much into the initial results. The sample sizes are small, especially with respect to the separatist Bloc Québécois, and the findings are based on reports and opinion pieces published before any major policy announcements had been made, including Harper's blockbuster pledge to reduce the hated GST.

While Tories will be tempted to claim the analysis proves they can't get a fair shake from the press, Soroka said the monitoring is not intended to measure media bias. Rather, it's intended to measure how well or poorly the parties' are faring, as reflected in the coverage.

The OMPP tracks election coverage in seven major dailies: the Globe and Mail, National Post, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Toronto Star, La Presse and Le Devoir. It tallies the number of mentions each leader and party receives and rates the tone of each article as positive, negative or neutral. The OMPP then tallies the percentage of positive mentions and subtracts the percentage of negative mentions to arrive at a "net tone" for the coverage.

In the first two days, the Liberals fared the worst overall, with a net tone of -17 per cent, compared to a net tone of -7 per cent for the Conservatives and -4 per cent for the Bloc. The NDP, at four per cent, was the only party with a net positive tone. As for the leaders, coverage of Harper was the most negative, a net tone of -15 per cent, compared to -5 per cent for Martin, -7 per cent for Duceppe and plus six per cent for Layton.

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