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The real story is that Trump’s negative coverage is being driven not by liberals or Democrats but by law-enforcement sources and pissed-off Republicans.
It’s important to understand the study’s methodology. According to its author, Harvard scholar Thomas Patterson, “Tone is judged from the perspective of the actor,” the actor being, in this case, Donald Trump. A story is coded as negative when “the actor is criticized directly”—for example when Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told a reporter, “Eleven weeks into his administration, we have seen nothing from President Trump on infrastructure, on trade, or on any other serious job-creating initiative”—or when “an event, trend, or development reflects unfavorably on the actor.” So negative stories are either stories that quote someone griping about Trump, or stories about developments that cast a negative light on his performance.
And here’s a key point, as it relates to that first category: “Republican voices,” wrote Patterson, “accounted for 80 percent of what newsmakers said about the Trump presidency, compared to only 6 percent for Democrats and 3 percent for those involved in anti-Trump protests.” So the coverage has not featured a bunch of liberals complaining about Trump—Democrats and those engaged with the anti-Trump resistance were few and far between. “The fact that Trump has received more negative coverage than his predecessor is hardly surprising,” the report says. “The early days of his presidency have been marked by far more missteps and miss-hits, often self-inflicted, than any presidency in memory, perhaps ever.”
full: https://www.thenation.com/article/conservatives-complain-republicans-liberal-bias/
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