Negative media coverage of Donald Trump was 77 percent during the general election, according to a study released Wednesday by the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Trump complained during the campaign that the media was biased
against him in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton. The study found that
while Clinton also received more negative coverage than positive, it was
only 64 percent negative in the general election.
When it came to questions of the candidates' fitness for office,
Clinton and Trump each had equally high negative numbers: 87 percent.
"Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of
magnitude as those surrounding Trump?" the study's author, Thomas
Patterson, a Bradlee professor of Government and the Press at the
Harvard Kennedy School, wrote. "It's a question that political reporters
made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign."
The negative press coverage isn't limited to political races, the
study found. Negative stories also are far more common than positive
ones on topics such as immigration, Muslims, health policy and the
economy.
"The real bias of the press is not that it's liberal. Its bias is a decided preference for the negative," Patterson wrote.
The study analyzed news reports by ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, the Los
Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street
Journal, and The Washington Post.
