Mike Lee pounded by home state newspapers

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) was widely viewed as the No. 2 figure responsible for Congressional Republicans' attempt to defund Obamacare by way of threatening a federal government shutdown. It's a plan that didn't fare so well for him in the print news media back home.

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

From Sept. 17-Oct. 31, two weeks before and two weeks after the shutdown, Lee was hammered in both opinion and news articles in two prominent Utah papers, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News, according to a study by the conservative Media Research Center:

Editorial opinion [of Lee] was heavily negative — by a margin of 25-to-1 — while news pages tilted in favor of Lee’s critics by a greater than three-to-one margin (17 negative stories vs. five positive ones, with 14 rated as balanced).

The study notes, however, that the Tribune and the Deseret News weren't equal in doling out the criticism on Lee. The Tribune ran nearly four times as many negative stories on Lee as the Deseret News, according to the study.

Lee is up for reelection in 2016.

@eScarry