Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Negative/Positive; Fact/Fiction

President Trump has stated multiple times in different ways that the media is out to get him. Is this unsubstantiated Trump paranoia or does this accusation have legs?

A few weeks ago a conservative somewhat older friend of mine, Jim, said that he had almost stopped reading our local paper because the coverage of Trump was so negative – estimated by him as being 90% negative. At the time I thought that this was somewhat of a fictional overestimation, but on 5/18/17 a study from Harvard’s Kennedy School  of Government reported some facts. It stated that the media coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days set a new standard for negativity. The coverage from the Washington Post (Wapo) was 83% negative and the coverage from the New York Times (NYT) was 87% negative.

(From now on I will refer to these two “bastions of journalism” as ‘The Dueling Banjos’ as they seem to be always trying to one-up the other guy in terms of loudness, negativity, fake news, and anonymous sources.) Since our local paper gets most of its stories from either/both of The Dueling Banjos, Jim’s estimation was actually pretty accurate.

The other day when I was speaking to two liberal women acquaintances the President’s name came up, and they both were close to apoplectic when they angrily blurted out that he was in bed with the Russians. This, despite the fact that no actual confirmation of any direct Trump-Russian connection has been documented. My guess is that they “missed” this on either NBC or CNN (both with 93% negative Trump stories) or CBS (91% negative).

Is it possible that the Harvard study was cherry-picking opinions on a few isolated topics? . . . No, as other than ‘economics’ (54% negative) all of the rest of the individual Trump topics were evaluated as >70% negative media coverage. To top it off, when it came to ‘fitness for office’, the Dueling Banjos were at 96% and 87%,  ‘no’  – while CNN & NBC were at 82% and 80%,  ‘no’.   In that same recent Harvard study, the author, professor Thomas E. Patterson, warned that “the unrelenting negative coverage could also erode public trust in journalism”. . .  Duh!!

(In reference to that statement I would omit the word, ‘could’, and add the word, ‘further’ . . . “the unrelenting negative coverage further erodes the public trust in journalism”!)

Along the same lines, Watergate famous journalist Bob Woodward, while on uber liberal MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ on 5/19/17 called on fellow journalists to ‘dial back a bit’ on the urge to stick it to the White House. He also warned against ‘drinking the Anti-Trump Kool-Aid’. In addition, Woodward called on the national media to keep focused on reporting the straight news, after many reporters have revealed a bias against President Trump.

Wow, that’s a novel idea . . . journalists actually concentrating on only reporting the news, and not opining on the front page.

Obviously, Mr. Woodward is referring to ‘The Dueling Banjos’ and all the local newspapers that blindly follow the Banjos like lemmings!  Back to ? Trump’s paranoia? . . . is it fact or fiction?  Harvard professor Patterson concluded, “The sheer level of negative coverage gives weight to Trump’s contention, one shared by his core constituency, that the media are hell-bent on destroying his presidency”!

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