This is TOOOO funny!

Working in academia, you run into some real bizarre people. But Maria Grabe and Erik Bucey, both of Indiana University, have taken weirdness to a new level. They claim in a new book that network coverage of the presidential elections from 1992 to 2004 showed a "slight tilt to the Republican side":

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Feb. 24 (UPI) -- The major U.S. broadcasters demonstrated bias towards Republicans in their coverage of presidential campaigns between 1992 and 2004, a new book contends.
Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Bucy, both associate professors of telecommunications at Indiana University, are the authors of "Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections" published by Oxford University Press. They analyzed coverage of the elections on ABC, CBS and NBC and concluded all three networks showed a slight tilt to the Republican side.
"We don't think this is journalists conspiring to favor Republicans. We think they're just so beat up and tired of being accused of a liberal bias that they unknowingly give Republicans the benefit in coverage," said Grabe. "It's self-censorship that journalists might be imposing on themselves."

So what methodology did they use to decide which way the networks tilted?

Grabe, a former journalist with the South Africa Broadcasting Corp., and Bucey examined footage between Labor Day and the election in all four election years. They found more single-party stories about the Republicans in every year except 1992.
They also found that Republicans were likely to get more flattering camera work, less likely to be shown in tight closeup or from a great distance and more likely to be photographed from a low angle.

So those awful Republicans got more single party stories. Does it matter at all what is said about the Republicans in the stories? So what about the stories that CBS ran about the Texas Air National Guard memos in 2004, that they claimed were authentic but were exposed as forgeries by bloggers, just hours after the broadcast? Were those counted as bias in favor of Republicans because they were single-party stories?