Reading too much negative anything is bad for the psyche. It just so happens that the MSM is full-on TDS and they can't seem to let go. Trump is the blackhole for MSM, everything is somehow connected to "Orange Man Bad".
Moreover, the Washington Post reported that 90% of Trump's coverage is negative [1].
Do you know anyone that is 90% terrible? I doubt it. Taking a step back from one's political views, which is hard for a lot of people, it becomes obvious that there's little honest and unbiased reporting going on within MSM.
Sure it's fine to read information with a particular viewpoint (be it conservative or liberal), as long as the reader is made aware that the "facts" are framed from a particular viewpoint. Otherwise it's just brainwashing and intellectually dishonest. I think any rational person can get behind this sort of "zero-trust framework".
It's fair to say that Trump makes a great deal of the news about him so if a majority of it is negative that is his doing and not the media that reports on it.
It's also fair to say that "heastst.com" is blatantly biased.
Reading too much negative anything is bad for the psyche. It just so happens that the MSM is full-on TDS and they can't seem to let go. Trump is the blackhole for MSM, everything is somehow connected to "Orange Man Bad".
Moreover, the Washington Post reported that 90% of Trump's coverage is negative [1].
Do you know anyone that is 90% terrible? I doubt it. Taking a step back from one's political views, which is hard for a lot of people, it becomes obvious that there's little honest and unbiased reporting going on within MSM.
Sure it's fine to read information with a particular viewpoint (be it conservative or liberal), as long as the reader is made aware that the "facts" are framed from a particular viewpoint. Otherwise it's just brainwashing and intellectually dishonest. I think any rational person can get behind this sort of "zero-trust framework".
That's where I disagree. taking a negative stance on Trump IS taking a side.
What I would like is for the journalist to report the fact and let us reader chose if it is negative or positive.
The facts can include the views of external people giving their views on it (as long as it is clearly documented in the sources that it is the views of someone external). But if the journalist himself takes a side, then all bets are lost.
"Funnily enough, the over-coverage of Trump by the media actually gave him an edge when it came to the election. Despite the fact that negative news on Trump were the norm, they only gave Trump more publicity. A prime example that, the lower the media sinks, the more it backfires on them."
THAT is the only part of the article that rings true. Trump deserves all the negative media coverage in the world, but the media's lack of tact and professionalism ends up helping him and reinforcing his narrative.
The problem I see is that unless these organisations are beyond criticism they can always be accused of bias and all their work dismissed, and then consider the context:
'It is impossible to overstate the degree of daily vituperation visited upon the president in the media. Comics and actors use their non-political programs to attack him, often to the implicit applause of the press. Virtually all coverage outside the conservative Fox News and isolated conservative outlets is negative, often couched in highly hostile terms. Virtually all of the columnists at the New York Times and the Washington Post, America’s two most respected dailies, despise Trump – and that includes nearly all of the conservative, libertarian and Republican columnists too. Trump supporters who follow news at all cannot escape the daily blast of negativity. This has, predictably, hardened the attitudes of many Trump supporters.'
That looks like you want presidents to be graded on a curve. Maybe more negative articles have been written about Trump because he's governing in a negative, divisive, chaotic manner and there are countless of examples where he lies or behaves badly that warrant negative coverage.
Are you talking about this[1] study? Because it doesn't say that the media is "left-leaning". Rather, it says that their coverage of Trump has been more negative than positive (in the first 100 days, the period the study examines). Rather than the result of bias, it could simply be that he's done a bunch of obviously-bad things. Which one can certainly argue.
Another point: the article points out that, despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage, most of the time, they're using his own voice:
What’s truly atypical about Trump’s coverage is that it’s sharply negative despite the fact that he’s the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage. Typically, newsmakers and groups complain that their media narrative is negative because they’re not given a chance to speak for themselves. Over the past decade, U.S. coverage of Muslims has been more than 75 percent negative. And Muslims have had little chance to tell their side of the story. Muslims account for less than 5 percent of the voices heard in news reports about Islam.[31] So why is Trump’s coverage so negative even though he does most of the talking? The fact is, he’s been on the defensive during most of his 100 days in office, trying to put the best face possible on executive orders, legislative initiatives, appointments, and other undertakings that have gone bad.
I would challenge you to find a single article reporting on any of Trump's speeches, actions, or policies in a positive light from any of the "centrist" outlets that you posted.
In fact I would challenge you to find a single topic that was reported on differently by any of those sources. The fact that our primary media outlets consistently report nearly identical information and spin on every story is a glaring indication of political bias. And apparently it is enough to convince millions of viewers that these issues are cut and dry; that republicans are obviously evil, are the only ones engaged in gerrymandering, that the left would never support authoritarian pursuits of power, etc.
I could link you dozens of articles, but I would be downvoted for posting "right wing propaganda". Meanwhile approximately 70MM people voted for Trump a second time, but the fact that none of our major outlets (even Fox was not friendly to trump) represent the views of these people is fine, because they're all ignorant, racist rednecks, right?
I don’t think so. Most mainstream media (I’ve come to hate that term) skews a bit towards the left politically, but not nearly as much as the far right thinks they do. President Bush got better coverage - certainly not 50/50, but not 97% against either. The difference here is that Trump, by virtually any measure, is just that awful.
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.
And I’m not. But I think even you would agree that the overwhelmingly negative press coverage - almost all of it opinion based - has some effect on the disapproval ratings. 50% was going to be built in from the start. Somebody should do the math to figure out the correlation between the ratio of positive to negative press stories and the disapproval ratings for both Trump and Obama. I think you’d find that if you normalize that ratio for both of these guys, Trump actually wins that race.
NYT can't go a single, off-topic article without crap-smearing Trump. When a media outlet covers a person 100% negatively, at what point does its readership begin to realize there may be a conflict of interest? Or does the collective cognitive dissonance take care of that all by itself?
With the increasing polarization, there will have to be some point. For example, right now, Fox News at least mention negative news relating to the president, and the NY Times at least acknowledge Trump's existence.
In the future, I predict the newspapers will be naked propagandists. If they judge that some thing someone says or does is going to be bad for their party, they will just ignore it outright or lie about it.
In 2016, Fox News had people criticizing Trump, and CNN were (unintentionally) signal-boosting him by letting him dominate the news coverage. In say 2024, I think that Fox News will fire anyone who says anything bad about the Republican nominee, and CNN will not mention them by name on air.
"The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious."
After Trump won, story after story, show after show in the MSM and beyond was about reaching out and talking to the Trump voters. Famously left-wing people went out to speak with Trump voters to get to know them, to understand why they voted, and made sure to humanize them. They went out of their way to not be negative. This went on for a long time.
This was on CNN, NYTimes, Washington Post, and other MSM outlets.
The flaw in this article is reading only the negative headlines, and ignoring all the reporting that is done.
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