Since Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, the news coverage has been relentlessly biased. If you doubt that, a new study from Harvard University should answer that question definitively. The study, conducted by Professor Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Schorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found 80% of the media’s coverage of President Trump during the first 100 days of his administration was negative. Not only that, but news about President Trump and his administration consumed fully 41% of all news coverage, three times as much as previous administrations and coverage of presidents. Trump has complained of being targeted by the news media and Patterson wrote, “The sheer level of negative coverage gives weight to Trump’s contention, one shared by his core constituency, that the media are hell bent on destroying his presidency.”
Compare the numbers for Trump to those enjoyed by Barack Obama. The coverage for Obama was 59% favorable versus 41% unfavorable. Any fair-minded person will recall the media was notoriously hostile to the presidency of George W. Bush, yet during the first 100 days of the Bush administration, the news coverage was 57% negative versus 43% positive.
CNN and NBC averaged 93% negative coverage of Trump’s first 100 days with CBS creeping behind with 91% negative coverage. The television networks do not have a monopoly on negative coverage. The two most notable anti-Trump newspaper outlets – – – the New York Times and the Washington Post – – – averaged 87% and 83% negative coverage respectively. God knows it will irritate the leftists to know the fairest news outlet with proportional negative and positive coverage was Fox News. Fair and balanced indeed.
Some journalists have added their own commentary to the release of Patterson’s study. Bernard McGuirk described the media as “shrill”, “unhinged”, “rabid” and in a “feeding frenzy” where Trump is concerned. The bias of the CNN network drew the attention of Eric Bolling, who noted “…they’re coming in at 92, 93 percent” negative coverage of the president and his administration. Eboni Williams admitted the biased coverage means Americans have to sort through the fake news to ascertain just what is real and accurate.
None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who watch the daily news; nor does it come as a surprise to those of us who read news. For years the mainstream media has attempted to shade the truth and shape our thinking about national issues and personalities. To some degree it works; already we’ve seen the appointment of a special prosecutor over an incident where there is not a single shred of evidence that a crime has been committed.
Clearly, the mainstream media in this country is allied with the political left in the United States. The loss of the presidency and the notion Barack Obama’s rule was not permanent is a notion they cannot and will not accept. The rage of the left is hardly ever covered in this country by the media, save for in the most sympathetic terms.
Donald Trump was elected by average working people, a class dismissed by the national Democratic party and loathed by the media folks. The media absolves itself of any responsibility, claiming its only responsibility is to report what politicians do, not police their own profession or be introspective. In short, the media wants to hold everyone accountable save for themselves and their kind. Few people think about just what is lost in the shuffle. The media isn’t interested in much of anything save for how it relates to Trump and just how it might harm the president. Almost no one considers just what stories are blotted out because of the media’s hatred of and obsession with Donald Trump.
If you doubt the bias of the news media, consider, according to the Center for Public Integrity, 96% of journalists donating to a presidential campaign gave money to Hillary Clinton. Only 3.5% gave money to Trump. Likewise, in 1992, 89% of contributions from the news folks went to Bill Clinton, as compared to 7% for President George Bush. 2% gave money to the independent presidential campaign of Ross Perot. In 1996, only 15% of those writing for newspapers in this country identified themselves as conservatives and five years later it was down to a mere 6%. Is it any wonder some networks and newspapers have ten times the negative coverage of President Trump than positive?
Do the media outlets care about balancing coverage, much less covering anything besides Donald Trump? Impossible to say, but what I do know is there has never been in my lifetime more suspicion and distrust of the media in this country.
They did that the old fashioned way. They earned it.
