This is simply not true. Looking at the three mainstream cable channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) Fox hardly ever critical, MSNBC is almost exclusively critical, and CNN is pretty in between. Fox is by far the most popular of these three.
Similarly, the NYTimes and Washington Post are usually pretty critical of Trump (unless he's bombing people, in which case they love him) and the WSJ are somewhere in between.
Then, consider that Americans are increasingly not getting their news from these sources and podcasts, blogs, social media, etc. are becoming the primary source of news for many people.
All this to say, to claim 97% of media is critical of Trump is a wild fantasy of victimhood that has no basis in reality.
I'm pretty sure the news networks are ecstatic that Trump is in the news. Their incentive is not really aligned with delivering scientific information.
It is a remarkable phenomenon that all three cable news channels in America have dedicated themselves entirely to the individual of Donald Trump, all the way from 2016 to 2024 and beyond.
It defies a certain logic that audiences can tire of Marvel movies that come out a couple times a year, but daily coverage of such an asinine topic for nearly a decade is supported by the market?
Certainly this has to be culturally damaging, but everyone sort of pretends it's normal for the country to focus on the antics and tribulations of one person.
TV runs the country for now but I am optimistic their vapidity will drive the next generations to the internet. There appears to me a growing number of young people growing up online.
There is a robust amount of media that pretty much cheers everything Trump does (Fox News, a bunch of online news operations).
CNN has a bunch of people they pay to come say how great Trump is. That sounds sarcastic, but they really do have several paid commentators that will work backwards and find anything to justify anything.
How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly?
It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's insults.
We should not turn a blind eye towards some instances of bias in media simply because they reinforce our own values and beliefs.
Mainstream media, such as Fox News and the tabloid-sphere, very much push those leaders’ views without challenge and with much fanfare. I would very much call the most mainstream tv news station in the US a massive fan of the most mainstream politician, Trump.
What hole do you have to be living in where you don't see or recognize the "media" outlets that support Trump? There are entire networks dedicated to it ...
CNN is not the only "media" - get your head out of your ass Glenn.
You’re playing into his game as soon as you start talking about “the media”.
There is no one “the media”. The journalism produced by cable news opinion segments is not the same as that produced by national print outlets, which is also not the same as a local newspaper. Equating them all is something Trump and his friends would very much like you to do.
I'm not going to waste my time if you refuse the read the study.
> The above report does not break down anything about "left leaning media" vs. centrist media vs. FOX news
It literally does. Read the study...
"When critics have accused journalists of fueling the Trump bandwagon, members of the media have offered two denials. One is that they were in watchdog mode, that Trump’s coverage was largely negative, that the “bad news” outpaced the “good news.” The second rebuttal is that the media’s role in Trump’s ascent was the work of the cable networks—that cable was “all Trump, all the time” whereas the traditional press held back."
"Neither of these claims is supported by the evidence. Figure 2 shows the news balance in Trump’s coverage during the invisible primary. As can be seen, Trump’s coverage was favorable in all of the news outlets we studied. There were differences from one outlet to the next but the range was relatively small, from a low of 63 percent positive or neutral in The New York Times to a high of 74 percent positive or neutral in USA Today. Across all the outlets, Trump’s coverage was roughly two-to-one favorable."
"By our estimate, Trump’s coverage in the eight news outlets in our study was worth roughly $55 million. Trump reaped $16 million in ad-equivalent space in The New York Times alone, which was more than he spent on actual ad buys in all media during all of 2015. In our eight outlets, the ad-equivalent value of Trump’s coverage was more than one-and-a-half times the ad-equivalent value of Bush, Rubio, and Cruz’s coverage, more than twice that of Carson’s, and more than three times that of Kasich’s. Moreover, our analysis greatly underestimates the ad-equivalent value of Trump’s exposure in that it’s based on only eight media outlets, whereas the whole of the media world was highlighting his candidacy. Senator Cruz might well be correct in claiming that Trump’s media coverage was worth the equivalent of $2 billion in ad buys."
They only included positive/neutral coverage when analyzing ad-equivalent purchases.
The True Trump Believers tend to gravitate towards fringe news sources online. Breitbart and The Blaze are probably the most well known, but there are many others. Most of the others are basically Wordpress blogs with a theme that makes them look like a news site. They run the gamut from “slightly right of center politically”, to “racist and not really trying to hide it”.
All this to say, if you’re consuming popular American news sites and TV channels, you’ll see almost nothing that paints Trump in a positive light. The fringe sources typically portray him as the savior America needs.
I’m not a Trump supporter in the least, but I do scan some of the milder fringe sites periodically just to see what the conversation is like there. It’s useful to see what the world looks like through their eyes. But I don’t linger long, because some of it is truly awful.
I think the newspaper endorsements line was meant to be evidence, but I'll flesh it out a little.
Of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the US, 57 endorsed Clinton while only 2 endorsed Trump. Of the top 50 papers, two gave no endorsement, two endorsed "not Trump", and one endorsed Johnson. The other 45 directly endorsed Clinton, with zero endorsing Trump. So: when traditional journalists and editors at major newspapers took explicit positions on the election, they almost all opposed Trump.
This is obviously a different question than "is the media conservative or liberal?", "is the non-editorial coverage at major news organizations generally anti-Trump?", or "are news organizations employing a partisan agenda in their decisions about how to cover Trump?
The first one of those questions is relatively easy to answer: according to an Indiana University survey of 1080 journalists in broadly 'traditional' roles, 7% identify as Republicans, compared to 28% who identify as Democrats. The number identifying as Republicans has also been falling faster than the number identifying as Democrats in equivalent prior surveys.
The second one is more open ended, but I think we can at least sketch the outlines of an answer.
Intuitively, I would propose that cable television leans left with one obvious exception, while local news and television stations are much more scattered - and less dependent on the views of their journalists, since they often have purchased content and partisan owners like Sinclair.
Factually, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard finds that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, news coverage of Trump was 80% negative. They find that CNN and NBC were most negative, while even Fox was 52% negative.
The third is so open-ended that I can't imagine discussing it without agreeing on a bunch of specific standards for evidence and discussion, because it requires deciding where objective coverage of badness stops and partisanship starts.
People that have a working brain shouldn't care what networks think or determine. Those networks must limit themselves to neutrally reporting the news and let the people make up their minds.
This election has proven that US, but also Western-European media are extremely biased and see themselves as the arbiters of truth. Reading German media I noticed - without exaggeration - that Trump was getting worse press than actual real dictators. Mainstream German newspapers had articles where they invited mental health specialists to speculate on what mental afflictions Trump might be suffering from.
Extremely unethical show from the mainstream media.
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