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Speaking as someone who absorbs American media externally, there does seem to be a disconnect looking in. About 40% of the America seems to still support Donal

Speaking as someone who absorbs American media externally, there does seem to be a disconnect looking in. About 40% of the America seems to still support Donald Trump, under most polls. It certainly isn't true that 40% of the media supports Donald Trump. As an external viewer, it's easy to imagine no-one was ever going to vote for Donald Trump, no-one ever supported him, and no-one supports him today, but that's clearly not reality. Personally, I'd never have voted for him, but it's hard to understand why many of those who voted for him continue to support him, and it doesn't feel like the media is doing a good job here.

asdf21 6y ago
Exactly right. Something like 97% of news coverage is critical towards Trump. I'm not sure what that number should be, but 97% seems like there is a deeper and systemic issue.
- larrywright 6y ago
  I don’t think so. Most mainstream media (I’ve come to hate that term) skews a bit towards the left politically, but not nearly as much as the far right thinks they do. President Bush got better coverage - certainly not 50/50, but not 97% against either. The difference here is that Trump, by virtually any measure, is just that awful.
- horsemessiah 6y ago
  This is simply not true. Looking at the three mainstream cable channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) Fox hardly ever critical, MSNBC is almost exclusively critical, and CNN is pretty in between. Fox is by far the most popular of these three. Similarly, the NYTimes and Washington Post are usually pretty critical of Trump (unless he's bombing people, in which case they love him) and the WSJ are somewhere in between. Then, consider that Americans are increasingly not getting their news from these sources and podcasts, blogs, social media, etc. are becoming the primary source of news for many people. All this to say, to claim 97% of media is critical of Trump is a wild fantasy of victimhood that has no basis in reality.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2019/11/12/impeachment-frenzy-tv-networks-blast-trump-96-negative-news https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2019/11/12/i... 96% Negative Spin from the main 3 networks. >Silent on Economic Success: Despite record highs in the stock market and a fifty-year low in the unemployment rate, the President’s handling of the economy was given a stingy 4 minutes, 6 seconds of airtime during these six weeks, or less than one percent of all Trump administration news (645 minutes).
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      You're citing an openly right wing media watchdog whose goal is to perpetuate the narrative that right wing ideas are suppressed. It calls CNN "hacks" in it's headlines. That's not a reliable source.
      - asdf21 6y ago
        Exactly who else is going to cover the % of negative media coverage on Trump, in your mind, other than a "right wing" source?
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        An academic source that can describe a pre-propoosed methodology and doesn't have the appearance of being explicitly anti-CNN. You can't seriously think that "the only people we can believe are people who openly call CNN hacks". That's just an admission that you only believe people who agree with you. Put another way: there was a recent article on HN about using sources who you had uncertainty about, because those sources give you the most information (in a bayesian sense, they cause you to update your priors the most). The source listed gives me no reason to update my priors, because I could predict the result from the source.
        asdf21 6y ago
        Lol, what? So were you able to find a "academic source" that audited the media in this way?
- seppin 6y ago
  If by critical you mean reporting what he does and what he says, then yes. That's probably around 97%. Why you think the above is somehow editorialized, I don't know. I think most mainstream news outlets do an incredible job maintaining their calm while reporting truly absurd and dangerously ignorant actions of the current US President.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    >I think most mainstream news outlets do an incredible job maintaining their calm while reporting truly absurd and dangerously ignorant actions of the current US President. You sound pretty biased.
  - easterncalculus 6y ago
    Question: Have you watched the news, instead of just reading it online? You can't go to any outlet (CNN, MSNBC, NBC, even Fox) without a couple snippets of dialogue from whatever's been recorded and then five or so 'experts' editorializing it.
    - seppin 6y ago
      Yes that's probably why I don't watch news on TV
majormajor 6y ago
> About 40% of the America seems to still support Donald Trump, under most polls. It certainly isn't true that 40% of the media supports Donald Trump. As an external viewer, it's easy to imagine no-one was ever going to vote for Donald Trump, no-one ever supported him, and no-one supports him today, but that's clearly not reality. You seem to be missing a substantial portion of American media. You just gotta know where to look. There are far more outlets than the ones that get shared on HN, and something like talk radio is gonna be a complete black hole to the group here.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  It is very possible (in fact, it would make sense), that the anti-Trump media, and the media that tries to reach outside of America to a worldwide audience, would have almost 100% overlap.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    One of the problems Trump faces is that he's so outside the expected behavior boundaries that positives get much harder to find. The hard-conservative anti-Trumper is FAR more common than the hard-conservative anti-Busher was. One of my historical barometers for what right-wing media is saying was talking to my parents and family, since they would try to convince me of the talking points they were hearing from Fox News and AM talk radio, and I'd try to convince them of what I was getting from the NYT or the New Yorker. But they abandoned Fox News and most of the talk shows they listened to in 2017 because they can't stand Trump (but still yet cannot bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, because abortion). So now all I know is that those were still wildly conservative-leaning and pro-Trump 3 years ago. I'm sure they're still conservative-leaning, but I no longer have as direct a view into if they're pro-Trump.
larrywright 6y ago
The True Trump Believers tend to gravitate towards fringe news sources online. Breitbart and The Blaze are probably the most well known, but there are many others. Most of the others are basically Wordpress blogs with a theme that makes them look like a news site. They run the gamut from “slightly right of center politically”, to “racist and not really trying to hide it”. All this to say, if you’re consuming popular American news sites and TV channels, you’ll see almost nothing that paints Trump in a positive light. The fringe sources typically portray him as the savior America needs. I’m not a Trump supporter in the least, but I do scan some of the milder fringe sites periodically just to see what the conversation is like there. It’s useful to see what the world looks like through their eyes. But I don’t linger long, because some of it is truly awful.
Terretta 6y ago
As a hypothetical, imagine a leader who was consistently right. To be fair and balanced, what % of press coverage should be negative? What if the idea that a fair and balanced press should split equally pro and con is itself a disconnect?
joshuamorton 6y ago
Which media do you watch? The largest cable news network is staunchly pro-trump.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tootie 6y ago
But what exactly is the responsibility of a newspaper in this? I don't want to delve into opinion or ideology, but I think it's objectively true that Donald Trump lies constantly. A news source based on reporting facts should not be giving credence to nonsense because a lot of people believe it. Take climate change for example. Trump and the American right like to portray it as either untrue or unimportant. They are wrong. The NY Times is not serving anyone by running climate change denial opinions. It would be pandering. There's a strong thread of COVID-19 denialism on the right as well. It's all false and misleading. Those voices pushing to reopen quickly may have a lot of followers, but the NY Times absolutely should not amplify their voices.

asdf21 6y ago

Exactly right. Something like 97% of news coverage is critical towards Trump. I'm not sure what that number should be, but 97% seems like there is a deeper and systemic issue.

larrywright 6y ago
I don’t think so. Most mainstream media (I’ve come to hate that term) skews a bit towards the left politically, but not nearly as much as the far right thinks they do. President Bush got better coverage - certainly not 50/50, but not 97% against either. The difference here is that Trump, by virtually any measure, is just that awful.
horsemessiah 6y ago
This is simply not true. Looking at the three mainstream cable channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) Fox hardly ever critical, MSNBC is almost exclusively critical, and CNN is pretty in between. Fox is by far the most popular of these three. Similarly, the NYTimes and Washington Post are usually pretty critical of Trump (unless he's bombing people, in which case they love him) and the WSJ are somewhere in between. Then, consider that Americans are increasingly not getting their news from these sources and podcasts, blogs, social media, etc. are becoming the primary source of news for many people. All this to say, to claim 97% of media is critical of Trump is a wild fantasy of victimhood that has no basis in reality.
- asdf21 6y ago
  https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2019/11/12/impeachment-frenzy-tv-networks-blast-trump-96-negative-news https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2019/11/12/i... 96% Negative Spin from the main 3 networks. >Silent on Economic Success: Despite record highs in the stock market and a fifty-year low in the unemployment rate, the President’s handling of the economy was given a stingy 4 minutes, 6 seconds of airtime during these six weeks, or less than one percent of all Trump administration news (645 minutes).
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    You're citing an openly right wing media watchdog whose goal is to perpetuate the narrative that right wing ideas are suppressed. It calls CNN "hacks" in it's headlines. That's not a reliable source.
    - asdf21 6y ago
      Exactly who else is going to cover the % of negative media coverage on Trump, in your mind, other than a "right wing" source?
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        An academic source that can describe a pre-propoosed methodology and doesn't have the appearance of being explicitly anti-CNN. You can't seriously think that "the only people we can believe are people who openly call CNN hacks". That's just an admission that you only believe people who agree with you. Put another way: there was a recent article on HN about using sources who you had uncertainty about, because those sources give you the most information (in a bayesian sense, they cause you to update your priors the most). The source listed gives me no reason to update my priors, because I could predict the result from the source.
        asdf21 6y ago
        Lol, what? So were you able to find a "academic source" that audited the media in this way?
seppin 6y ago
If by critical you mean reporting what he does and what he says, then yes. That's probably around 97%. Why you think the above is somehow editorialized, I don't know. I think most mainstream news outlets do an incredible job maintaining their calm while reporting truly absurd and dangerously ignorant actions of the current US President.
- asdf21 6y ago
  >I think most mainstream news outlets do an incredible job maintaining their calm while reporting truly absurd and dangerously ignorant actions of the current US President. You sound pretty biased.
- easterncalculus 6y ago
  Question: Have you watched the news, instead of just reading it online? You can't go to any outlet (CNN, MSNBC, NBC, even Fox) without a couple snippets of dialogue from whatever's been recorded and then five or so 'experts' editorializing it.
  - seppin 6y ago
    Yes that's probably why I don't watch news on TV

majormajor 6y ago

> About 40% of the America seems to still support Donald Trump, under most polls. It certainly isn't true that 40% of the media supports Donald Trump. As an external viewer, it's easy to imagine no-one was ever going to vote for Donald Trump, no-one ever supported him, and no-one supports him today, but that's clearly not reality. You seem to be missing a substantial portion of American media. You just gotta know where to look. There are far more outlets than the ones that get shared on HN, and something like talk radio is gonna be a complete black hole to the group here.

CJefferson 6y ago
It is very possible (in fact, it would make sense), that the anti-Trump media, and the media that tries to reach outside of America to a worldwide audience, would have almost 100% overlap.
- majormajor 6y ago
  One of the problems Trump faces is that he's so outside the expected behavior boundaries that positives get much harder to find. The hard-conservative anti-Trumper is FAR more common than the hard-conservative anti-Busher was. One of my historical barometers for what right-wing media is saying was talking to my parents and family, since they would try to convince me of the talking points they were hearing from Fox News and AM talk radio, and I'd try to convince them of what I was getting from the NYT or the New Yorker. But they abandoned Fox News and most of the talk shows they listened to in 2017 because they can't stand Trump (but still yet cannot bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, because abortion). So now all I know is that those were still wildly conservative-leaning and pro-Trump 3 years ago. I'm sure they're still conservative-leaning, but I no longer have as direct a view into if they're pro-Trump.

larrywright 6y ago

The True Trump Believers tend to gravitate towards fringe news sources online. Breitbart and The Blaze are probably the most well known, but there are many others. Most of the others are basically Wordpress blogs with a theme that makes them look like a news site. They run the gamut from “slightly right of center politically”, to “racist and not really trying to hide it”. All this to say, if you’re consuming popular American news sites and TV channels, you’ll see almost nothing that paints Trump in a positive light. The fringe sources typically portray him as the savior America needs. I’m not a Trump supporter in the least, but I do scan some of the milder fringe sites periodically just to see what the conversation is like there. It’s useful to see what the world looks like through their eyes. But I don’t linger long, because some of it is truly awful.

Terretta 6y ago

As a hypothetical, imagine a leader who was consistently right. To be fair and balanced, what % of press coverage should be negative? What if the idea that a fair and balanced press should split equally pro and con is itself a disconnect?

joshuamorton 6y ago

Which media do you watch? The largest cable news network is staunchly pro-trump.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tootie 6y ago

But what exactly is the responsibility of a newspaper in this? I don't want to delve into opinion or ideology, but I think it's objectively true that Donald Trump lies constantly. A news source based on reporting facts should not be giving credence to nonsense because a lot of people believe it. Take climate change for example. Trump and the American right like to portray it as either untrue or unimportant. They are wrong. The NY Times is not serving anyone by running climate change denial opinions. It would be pandering. There's a strong thread of COVID-19 denialism on the right as well. It's all false and misleading. Those voices pushing to reopen quickly may have a lot of followers, but the NY Times absolutely should not amplify their voices.