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The Establishments war on Donald Trump Title: How Donald Trump Has Disrupted the Media A telling new study released Monday by the Pew Media Center examines the tone of the news media’s coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office (spoiler alert—it has been overwhelmingly negative), and reveals the degree to which this singular presidency has profoundly altered the way in which the press does its job. The Pew study examined more than 3,000 news stories from radio, television, and the web (including the digital content from five national newspapers), and coded the reports as either positive (if they contained at least twice as many positive statements as negative), negative (the reverse), or neutral. The Pew researchers found that only 11 percent of the content about Trump and his presidency could be considered positive. Four times that number of stories, 44 percent, offered a negative assessment. That will not surprise anyone who has paid any attention to the news since inauguration day. What might be surprising is the way Trump—to whom the news media constitute “the opposition party”—has disrupted the media’s rule book. One of traditional journalism’s basic tenets was the need to maintain a distanced objectivity (or, at the very least, the appearance of it). Dan Rather’s 1974 confrontation with President Richard Nixon made a lasting impression precisely because it was a stark departure from the norm. But the Pew study found that, in the age of Trump, journalists increasingly consider themselves at liberty to directly refute the president or representatives of his administration. This happened in 10 percent of the stories studied. And, something about Trump has made the news media strikingly self-referential. Pew identified nine major types of sources relied on for coverage of Trump’s first 100 days. (The Pew researchers did not cite how often anonymous sources were used, which might have been an interesting bit of data.) The most commonly cited source, understandably, was the president or someone from his administration. But the next most commonly used source—employed 35 percent of the time —was not members of Congress, or experts, or everyday citizens, but “another news organization or journalist.” “One of the things that was interesting to see was that, while the topic of the news media was not a huge percentage of overall coverage, journalists were both the second most common source type as well as the second most common ‘trigger’ of the stories,” says Amy Mitchell, director of the Pew Research Center.* That might go some way in explaining the elite media feedback loop. Perhaps the most significant finding of the Pew project is the way in which the news media told their stories in Trump’s first 100 days. “When reporting on any event,” the study notes, “a reporter can choose any number of ways to orient the storyline. This study classified stories into one of two main frames: the president’s leadership and character or his core ideology and policy agenda. Overall, journalists structured their narratives far more around President Trump’s leadership and character than his policy agenda (74% vs. 26%, respectively).” “I’m not going to speak to as whether any element of the coverage is a good or bad thing,” says Mitchell. “It does indicate that there is less focus on the policy agenda than there is on him as a person.” The starkly negative tone of the news media’s Trump coverage is, then, perhaps inevitable. If the news media operates on the assumption that Trump is an existential threat to the Republic (and there is much to suggest that it does), a focus on the person, rather than the policy, of the President is going to reinforce that assumption. And, an argument can be made that the news media’s outsized focus on Trump himself, rather than on his policies, has produced coverage that may be more titillating than illuminating. The Pew researchers categorized media outlets according to the politics of their audiences—liberal, conservative, or in the middle. Not surprisingly, outlets with liberal audiences (NYT, Politico, and NPR among them) were the most negative in their reporting on Trump, reporting unfavorably 56 percent of the time. Conservative outlets (Fox News, Breitbart, talk radio) were the most positive, reporting favorably 31 percent of the time. Pew found that liberal outlets tended to use more sources than conservative outlets, but that conservative news sources produced far more stories (55 percent of them) that were neutral in tone. For perspective, Pew compared Trump’s coverage with that of his predecessors, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, looking only at a media universe that the four presidents had in common—the nightly newscasts on the broadcast networks, including PBS, as well as the print editions of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Newsweek. The time period studied was the first two months of each president’s tenure. In the first 60 days of the Trump presidency, 62 percent of the stories about him were negative—three times the amount of negative coverage received by Barack Obama from the same sources over the same period of his first term, and more than twice that of Clinton and Bush (28 percent). And, positive coverage? For Clinton, it was 27 percent, for Bush, 22 percent. Barack Obama’s positive coverage in the first 60 days—42 percent. And Donald J. Trump? Five percent. So, those sources—to some, the very definition of the mainstream media—were eight times more positive about Obama’s early presidency than they were about Trump’s. Pew makes clear that its studies do not attempt to detect bias in the news media’s presidential coverage. And, of course, it didn’t really need to. The coverage speaks for itself. Poster Comment: Given how slanted Pew's studies and polls are, this is pretty shocking. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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