Academics Lisa Dolak and Blaine Bettinger surveyed select mainstream media coverage of patents from 2005 to mid-2007. A concomitant paper was penned on the "eBay and the Blackberry®" cases. Primary sources were: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

There has not been a more significant period of change – and potential change – in the U.S. patent system in at least 40 years.

The more esoteric the subject, the more media representations influence public perceptions. Patent law and policy certainly qualify as subjects that most people encounter only through the media, and some mass media outlets, at least, have recently given increased attention to the patent system. Thus, it is likely that some members of the public found their introduction to the patent system in recent mass media content.

Various studies have shown that media accounts influence legislative policy-making, as well.

That explains the concerted effort by heavily-moneyed interest groups to skew the views of the rubes. Patent Hawk has repeatedly caught out the anti-patent propagandists planting their night soil: Opprobrium; Crying Time; Speculator; Hucksters; For the Hoopleheads; Patent Nonsense; and those in just the last half year, with orders of magnitude more bombardment unmentioned.

The press often acts as a distortion lens, viewing patents as in a funhouse mirror. Some religious patent bloggers feed the funhouse frenzy; 'patently silly' being exemplary, if seemingly benign (but not benign at all, conveying nothing but junk patents). But, always angling for an angle, the mainstream media can't help but show warp and bias in concocting snappy copy.

Reporters must regularly operate under constraints of severely limited time, money, and access to information. News reporting is a high-pressure, short-deadline job that privileges reliance on work routines, conventions, and formulas to simplify the choices that must be made and to standardize the operating procedures of information gathering and presentation.

In addition, economic pressures motivate reliance on story presentation techniques designed to increase audience appeal. For example, newspeople tend to personalize and dramatize news events in order to engage readers, sometimes as the expense of in-depth illumination of the political or social significance of the events in question.

Jimmy learned to ride his bicycle, and didn't fall down a well. Popular coed Suzy Creamcheese made it home safely from meeting friends at the ice cream parlor, averting abduction and other misfortunes that you're just dying to lap up. Happy outcomes are boring; not news.

[S]tories must picture conditions that could have a strong impact on readers or listeners. Stories about health hazards, consumer fraud, or pensions for the elderly influence people more than do unfamiliar happenings with which they cannot identify. To make stories attractive, newspeople commonly present them as events that happened to ordinary people. Inflation news becomes the story of the housewife at the supermarket; foreign competition becomes the story of laid-off workers in a local textile plant.

Drama is another characteristic which influences newsworthiness. Dramatic stories are engaging, exciting, and memorable. And drama can reinforce the extent to which readers can connect personally and emotionally with the news .

So, media conclusions of patents come as no surprise.

We found that 95% of all items in the dataset that we agreed upon carried a “neutral” headline,97 4% bore a “negative” headline, and fewer than 1% portrayed the patent system positively.

Overall, the item “body portrayals” were more negative than the headlines. Specifically, we found that while 2% of all of the items in the dataset portrayed the patent system in a positive light, the percentage of items which portrayed the patent system negatively was 15% (vs. 4% of the headline portrayals).

The Financial Times contained the highest percentage of negative body portrayals and the lowest percentage of neutral body portrayals. Only the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times contained any news items with positive body portrayals.

Presumably, each newspaper’s editorial position is most accurately reflected in its own unsigned editorials. We found that 70% of all the unsigned editorials in the dataset had a neutral headline while 30% communicated a negative headline. None of the headlines from the unsigned editorials portrayed the patent system in a positive light. The breakdown of headline portrayals among the unsigned editorials [found] the Financial Times having the most negative headlines and the Washington Post having the fewest.

Similar to the previous findings, the body portrayals of unsigned editorials were significantly more negative than the headline portrayals. We found that only 36% had a neutral portrayal of the patent system, while 64% had a negative portrayal. Again, none of the items portrayed the patent system in a positive manner.

Taken together, the headline and body portrayals from all the items, from the news items alone, and from the unsigned editorials reveal some differences in the “tone” of the coverage among individual newspapers that we examined. In each of the three headline analyses, the Financial Times had the fewest “neutral” headlines and the most “negative” headlines of all five newspapers. In contrast, when looking at all items (“news,” “editorial,” and “other” combined), as well as unsigned editorials alone, the Washington Post had the fewest “negative” headlines and the most “neutral” headlines. When looking at the “news” items alone, only the Financial Times had any headlines that both coders counted as “negative.”

Tell me something good -

The most prevalent positive message in the 50 items that contained any positive message was that “institutional actors are taking steps to improve the patent system.”

This of course a backhand twist: the patent system is broken, but something is being done.

Of course, inherent in the most prevalent positive message – that “institutional actors are taking steps to improve the patent system” – is the notion that the patent system needs improvement.

Onto the roil, and the patent holders the media loves to hate -

There was considerable agreement among the newspapers, as reflected in their overall content during the study period, as to the most significant problems in the patent system (aside from general calls for reform), namely, patent quality and patent “trolls.” These two messages were the most prevalent negative messages – or among the top three most prevalent – across all content in all papers and in each individual paper. A significant amount of the news and editorial content presenting these messages pertained to the eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. and NTP, Inc. v. Research in Motion, Ltd. litigations, two decisions that were heavily covered in the study newspapers during the relevant period.

But let's leave this on an upbeat note, a fact known to cognoscenti -

The most prevalent positive message in news items was that “the patent system is necessary to spur innovation.”