New survey shows that the media adopted anti-Trump rhetoric from scratch
Do The Media Hate Trump? Yes, And From The Very Start Of His Presidency, New Survey Shows
Media Bias: The mainstream media don’t like Trump, but it’s not really anything he did as president, a new survey by the Pew Research Center shows. The evidence: Among recent presidents, coverage of Trump’s initial weeks in office has been the most skewed and biased, by far.
Pew, with impeccable centrist credentials, decided to look at how the print, broadcast, cable and online media covered the first 60 days of each recent presidency — including Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s, Barack Obama’s, and Donald Trump’s. As far as the media are concerned, Trump never had a chance.
Some 62% of the media coverage of Trump was negative, Pew found. For Obama it, was just 20%; for Bush, 28%; for Clinton, also 28%. In other words, the media from the get-go had decided Trump was a bad president — before any of his policies had a chance to take hold.
Put another way, only 5% of the coverage Trump got in his first two months was positive, compared with 42% for Obama, 22% for Bush and 27% for Clinton. On no issue did Trump get anywhere near what could be called a high positive coverage. Highest was for political skills, with 15% of stories giving him positive coverage. But on immigration, just 9% of the stories were positive; for his appointments and nominations, just 11%; U.S.-Russia ties, 4%; health care, 9%.
“And it’s not a case of overwhelmingly negative coverage on one subject drowning out some moderately positive coverage on other matters,” noted the political blog Hot Air. “It was resoundingly negative across the board.”
Or, as Pew put it, “Compared with past administrations, coverage of Trump’s early days focused less on policy and was more negative overall.”
Is it any wonder that Trump has what many see as open contempt for the media when, despite their protestations to the contrary, they are utterly and completely biased against him? And don’t expect the media to mellow or become better.
One of the more insightful recent comments about the press came from a lifelong member of the mainstream, mostly liberal media: Bob Schieffer, form CBS News anchor. He noted last weekend on “Face the Nation” that the media seem to have become increasingly geographically centered and insular, with one out of five reporters residing in New York, Washington or Los Angeles, up sharply from one in eight as recently as 2004.
This is a problem, as much for the media as it is for Trump. The big media have become willing vocal mouthpieces and shills for progressive ideas, the Democratic Party and even far-left and extremist political movements, while viewing mainstream Americans living in “flyover country” as backward yokels and rural grotesques clinging to archaic religious beliefs.
But those are the people who voted for Trump, and it’s a big reason why the once-pervasive reach of the capital and coastal media enclaves has shrunk so noticeably; many outside of the coastal blue states have simply turned them off.
Sadly, there’s no solution for this. In the digital age, we can all self-segregate on the web by tuning out discordant voices. Increasingly, that’s happening across the country, leading to a kind of ideological Balkanization. There’s more shouting, and less conversation. And we’re all poorer for it.
For all this, the media deserve much of the blame. They have abandoned all pretense of fairness or objectivity in their reporting, in favor of rank politicization of the news and even basic facts. The Pew report on their biased coverage of Trump’s initial months in office, unfortunately, confirms this.
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