Tag: news media

It’s Not About Crowd Size, It’s About Delegitimizing the Media

Buck Banks

The Trump administration is creating a baseline expectation among its loyalists that they can’t trust anything said by the media. The spat over crowd size is a low-stakes, semi-comic dispute, but the groundwork is being laid for much more consequential debates over what is, and isn’t, true. Delegitimizing the institutions that might report inconvenient or damaging facts about the president is strategic for an administration that has made a slew of impossible promises and takes office amid a cloud of ethics concerns and potential scandals.

— Ezra Klein

Clinton’s Media Coverage Was More Negative

Buck Banks

62% to 38%


Ratio of negative to positive media coverage of Hillary Clinton over the full course of the election versus 56% negative to 44% positive for Donald Trump, a new Harvard study finds. Negative coverage was the order of the day in the general election. Not a week passed where the nominees’ coverage reached into positive territory. It peaked at 81% negative in mid-October, but there was not a single week where it dropped below 64% negative.

Majority Find Mainstream News Sources to Be Credible

Buck Banks

two-thirds

Of respondents to a Morning Consult poll found ABC, CBS and NBC to be credible news sources, while less than 1 in 5 found Breitbart or Fox News to be credible. Interesting finding: Thirty-one percent said they see fake news stories in their social media feeds more than once a day, and 55 percent said they have started reading a story only to realize it was fake.

The Media Deserves Blame, too

Buck Banks

On so many levels, vari­ous parts of the me­dia es­tab­lish­ment should look back at the en­tirety of their cov­er­age with re­gret and in some cases shame, wheth­er it was cable net­works hand­ing over their air­waves to Trump early in the race, or au­gust news­pa­pers tramp­ling on journ­al­ist­ic stand­ards in the fi­nal weeks in a des­per­ate bid to stop him. It was not a pretty sight. Just as it’s hard to get tooth­paste back in the tube, it will be hard for the press to re­store the bright line between re­port­ing and opin­ion.

— Charlie Cook