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In a speech to the 2017 graduating class of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, President Donald Trump complained about his treatment by the media, saying that “no politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.” According to a Harvard University report, Trump is right about his poor treatment.
No U.S. president has received as much coverage or as much negative coverage as Donald Trump in the modern media age, the report concluded after reviewing the first 100 days of media reports from seven U.S. print and broadcast outlets and three foreign media outlets.
The U.S. mainstream media profiled in the study devoted 41 percent of their coverage to Trump with 80 percent of it negative in tone.
“Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity,” the study concluded. Compared to past presidents, the researchers found “nothing comparable to the level of unfavorable coverage afforded Trump.”
The author of the report and Shorenstein Center professor Thomas Patterson spoke to Sinclair Broadcast Group on Monday explaining the reason behind both the overwhelming volume of coverage of Trump and its negativity.
“He’s almost a journalist’s dream,” Patterson said. Before the 2016 Republican primaries, many news organizations were scaling back, losing viewers and losing revenue. With Donald Trump, they found someone who would draw attention, boost ratings and keep the audience longer.
While Trump’s ability to boost ratings and his sheer novelty as a newsmaker can help explain the quantity of coverage, some have pointed to the Harvard study’s findings as a clear demonstration of media bias against Trump. Patterson fought back against those conclusions.
“The study that we did its not looking at the question of bias,” he said, something that would have been much more difficult.
He continued that “there is always level level of bias in the coverage,” but it’s not to the left or the right. The media tends to be biased “towards the negative,” he explained, “to tell us what’s wrong rather than what’s right with politics.”
Based on that bias toward the negative, Patterson explained that it is “unusual is to find a politician who gets mostly positive press.” Out of the past four presidents, only Barack Obama ever received a true honeymoon period with the media. Obama emerged from his first 100 days with 59 percent of the national media coverage reflecting positively on his presidency.
Given Trump’s lack of political experience and the number of missteps during his first months in office, there has been a lot of objectively bad news to report. When Trump’s first and second travel bans were held up in federal court, that was a bad day for Trump. Having to fire his national security adviser only three weeks into his presidency or having the Republican-controlled House pull Trump’s health care bill off the floor before a final vote were also hard to spin into something positive.
The real question is whether there is a concerted bias against Trump, or if his administration got off to a rocky start. “I think we can say for a fact that it got off to a rocky start. Was it as bad as it was portrayed in the press coverage? … Again, I don’t think we can answer that.”
Seth Lewis, the University of Oregon’s chair in emerging media studies, argued similarly that the clearest bias in Trump’s first 100 days is the media’s tendency to look for something out of the ordinary.
“The liberal bias can be overblown and misunderstood,” Lewis noted. “Instead what the press has is a bias toward the intriguing, the new, the ironic and also the negative. So given that Trump is an individual who delivers all of those things in spades, then it’s created this kind of dynamic where you see the coverage play out the way it has.”
The other source of negative coverage has been the sheer number of false or misleading statements uttered by Trump in the early phase of presidency. Politifact has rated 48 percent of the president’s major pronouncements either false or very false. The Washington Post fact-checker, famous for issuing Pinocchio ratings to politicians, counted 488 false or misleading claims made by the president in his first 100 days.
Trump’s way of communicating has been a “shock to the system,” explained James Warren, chief media writer of the Poynter Institute and journalist. “You have somebody who has told an unprecedented number of un-truths at this phase,” he continued. Based on a series of questionable or simply false claims, Warren added, “I think there’s a lot of cause by a lot of folks in the media to be very doubtful.”
The dynamic between Trump and the media has also been shaped in no small part by Trump’s so-called war with the media. During his first months in office, Trump has personally called out reporters and outlets, criticizing them as being “fake news” or treating him “unfairly.” Of the seven U.S. outlets covered in the Harvard study, Trump personally attacked six of them by name.
To a certain extent, Trump has fueled the negative coverage by the way he has treated the media, according to Anthony DiMaggio, Lehigh University professor of media and American politics.
“Trump has really enabled this because he and his administration and his spokespeople go out of their way to insult reporters. So they created a very adversarial relationship on top of being the recipient of criticism,” he explained.
In addition to openly criticizing reporters and news outlets that report unfavorable stories about the president, the Trump administration has also limited press access on a few occasions. Most recently, American press were excluded from an Oval Office meeting Trump had with members of the Russian government. On another occasion, the White House press office banned a handful of news outlets from attending an off-camera gaggle only hours after a speech by the president referring to the “fake news” media as an “enemy of the people.”
“He’s not doing himself any favors by how he has treated the press and how he has tried to limit access to press coverage,” said Lewis, arguing that Trump’s push-back against the press is only provoking them to more aggressively pursue stories related to his White House.
According to Patterson, this fight between the president and the mainstream media may lead to lasting damage. He warned that if the “long-running battle” of back and forth accusations about the media reporting fake news will likely “weaken the public’s confidence in the press.” If for no other reason, the public will become familiar with the claim and more susceptible to believing it.
Already the public has a decidedly negative view of the mainstream national media. Only 32 percent of Americans trust the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, according to a 2016 Gallup poll. That number is even lower among Republicans, only 14 percent of whom have confidence in reporting by the mainstream media.
According to one study from Emerson College, President Trump is viewed as more truthful than the mainstream media by a margin of about 10 percent.
The focus on the performance of the mainstream media is one of the flaws with the Harvard study, Warren said. The media outlets studied for the report were the big three nations newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and the four major television news networks, CNN, Fox, CBS and NBC.
The study “focused on the same small group of elite media,” Warren said, “but the majority of the country, they’re looking at local television, local papers.” Those trends are not tracked, he argued, despite many local news providers outperforming their cable or network competitors.
Each of the academics agreed that given the fact that the mainstream media has focused 41 percent of of its news coverage on Trump, there is a deep deficit of voices reflected in the national discussion.
Patterson himself concluded his report by stated that journalists have become “fixated” on Trump and “more voices need to be aired.”
Lewis advised that journalists need to break out of the bubble of strictly covering those people perceived as Washington’s power brokers.
“These conversations among politicians can seem very dramatic and very consequential, but they may not have a lot of meaning for people in other parts of the United States,” he said.
