University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors found disparate treatment by the three major cable networks of the Republican and Democratic candidates during the earliest five months of presidential primaries in 2007: "The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain faring the worst (63% negative) and Romney faring a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral. It is not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either. Nearly half of the Illinois Senator's stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama." A poll of likely presidential election voters released on March 14, 2007, by Zogby International reported that 83 percent of those surveyed believed in media bias, with 64 percent of respondents of the opinion the bias to favor liberals and 28 percent of respondents believing the bias to be conservative. In August 2008, the ombudsman of The Washington Post wrote that it had published almost three times as many front-page stories about Obama than it had about McCain since Obama won the Democratic party nomination that June. In September 2008 a Rasmussen poll found that 68 percent of voters believed that "most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win," and 49 percent of respondents stated that the reporters were helping Obama to get elected, but only 14 percent said the same about McCain. A further 51 percent said that the press was actively "trying to hurt" Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin with negative coverage. In October 2008, Washington Post media correspondent Howard Kurtz reported that Palin was again on the cover of Newsweek "but with the most biased campaign headline I've ever seen." After the election was over, the ombudsman Deborah Howell reviewed the coverage of the Post and concluded that it had been slanted toward Obama. "The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing