May 9, 2018
Media get trumped: President’s polls improve despite 90% negative coverage
By Jennifer Harper - The Washington Times
A wide-ranging study of broadcast news coverage of President Trump in the first four months of the year reveals that it was 90 percent negative — just as it was throughout 2017.
But the broadcasters may be losing their battle.
“The media get trumped: president’s polls improve despite 90 percent negative coverage,” said a new analysis of coverage released Tuesday.
“The liberal media’s war against President Trump was as fierce as ever during the first four months of 2018, but the onslaught appears to be for naught: In the face of massive and hostile coverage from ABC, CBS and NBC, Trump’s overall job approval rating actually rose, from 37 percent in mid-December to roughly 43 percent at the end of April,” writes Rich Noyes, a senior analyst for the Media Research Center.
The organization studied all broadcast evening news coverage of the President from Jan. 1 through April 30, and found 90 percent of the evaluative comments about Mr. Trump were negative — which is just what the organization documented during the entire twelve months of 2017.
This time, the group examined all 1,065 network evening news stories about Mr. Trump and top members of his administration during the first four months of this year.
“The coverage totaled a whopping 1,774 minutes, or roughly one-third of all evening news airtime,” Mr. Noyes said.
Some topics drew more negative responses than others during the study period.
The analysts found that 98 percent of the coverage of controversies such as the Russian collusion investigation, for example, were negative. On policy issues, 96 percent of the stories on gun control were negative, whereas broadcasters lightened up on Mr. Trump and the economy. Seven out of 10 of those stories were negative.
“There’s no precedent for a president receiving such a sustained level of negative press over such a long period of time,” Mr. Noyes said. “The fact that the public has become more favorable towards the president in this environment is the latest sign that the media watchdog’s bite isn’t as menacing as their bark suggests.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/8/donald-trumps-polls-improve-despite-90-negative-co/
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