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This is an example of how bias can sometime be seen malfeasance, but maybe is simply bureaucratic processes. FYI - It's always the Russians fault.

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In its partisan zeal to protect the ongoing witch hunt against President Trump, our Nixonian media went into hyper-drive last week to ensure that the unethical and un-American behavior of President Obama's FBI and Justice Department remained covered up from the public.

After this cynical effort failed with the release of the Nunes memo Friday, the media quickly switched tactics and is now working feverishly to muddy the waters about the horror show revealed in the memo.

To begin with, it is obvious that a hysterical talking point about declaring the release of the memo a " Constitutional Crisis " has been spread far and wide... Naturally, the "constitutional crisis" in question is not the wrongdoing committed by federal law enforcement. Instead, because we are now deep within the head of the media's fabricated reality where wrong is right and up is down, the "constitutional crisis" is that government wrongdoing was uncovered.

One way the media are hoping to shield the federal government from accountability for its indefensible lies, cover-ups, and civil rights violations is to muddy the waters; to distract us with nonsense so that we lose focus on the sins committed by an FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) that abused its power and public trust in unprecedented ways.

Here are 16 things the media do not want you to know about the Nunes memo:

1. The so-called Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document - namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

2. Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a "wiretap" to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent - the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.

3. It should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to monitor a presidential campaign belies belief. Why Obama's FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the application.

4. Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama's DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.

5. According to the Nunes memo, an "essential" part of the FISA application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.

6. So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that "no surveillance warrant would have been sought" without the dossier.

7. Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly "salacious and unverified." We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.

8. According to the Nunes memo, "Steele told [demoted DOJ official Bruce] Ohr, he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'"

9. Ohr, who was part of the FBI's anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr's own wife worked at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.

10. Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was "salacious and unverified" c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator's own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton's opponent.

11. In order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court - an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.

12. Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was "salacious and unverified," the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier. The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.

13. Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.

14. Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a "salacious and unverified" narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from - meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:

We also know the FBI wasn't straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele's connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau's intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

All of this dishonesty occurred under Comey, the man our media now hold up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw some of those committing the above abuses, he leaked potentially classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.

And finally...

16. Much of the "salacious and unverified" material in the dossier came from the Russians. In other words, those disgusting dossier lies about Trump's personal behavior came from Russian operatives. So there is no question that it was the Clinton campaign, Democrats, Steele, the FBI, and DOJ who colluded with the Russians to rig a presidential election.

Yes, there was collusion with the Russians, and those in our government currently investigating Trump in the hopes of overturning a presidential election are the colluders.
This post has been updated.

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16 Bombshells in the Nunes Memo the Media Do Not Want You to Know About | Breitbart

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After this cynical effort failed with the release of the Nunes memo Friday, the media quickly switched tactics and is now working feverishly to muddy the waters about the horror show revealed in the memo. To begin with, it is obvious that a hysterical talking point about declaring the release of the memo a " Constitutional Crisis " has been spread far and wide...

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Russian-linked automated Twitter accounts, or bots, retweeted Donald Trump almost half a million times in the final weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Twitter told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The 50,000 automated accounts the company determined had ties to Russia sent more than 2 million election-related tweets between September 1 and November 15, 2016.

The accounts retweeted then-candidate Donald Trump 10 times more than they retweeted his rival Hillary Clinton, according to Twitter's written statement to the committee. The accounts were responsible for 4.25% of all retweets of Trump's account in the last weeks of the election campaign and in the days immediately following the vote.

Twitter stressed throughout the report that the behavior of the accounts in question represented "a very small fraction of overall activity" on its platform in the lead-up to the election. The 2.1 million tweets sent by the automated accounts represented 1% of election-related activist tweets on its platform, Twitter said.

Twitter, along with Google and Facebook , late last year appeared before Congress for hearings on Russian efforts to use social media platforms to influence the U.S. presidential election.Twitter's analysis of Russian automated bot activity is the latest correspondence from the company to be released by congressional investigators.

The company also examined how the bots helped amplify content from what it described as "Russian-linked accounts" including @Wikileaks.

The 50,000 accounts retweeted Wikileaks almost 200,000 times during the ten-week period, Twitter said.

When hacked emails from the personal accounts of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were first released by Wikileaks in October 2016, it prompted the hashtag #PodestaEmails. The automated accounts were responsible for nearly 5% of all tweets containing the hashtag, Twitter found.

Automated Twitter accounts that retweet or tweet the same thing en masse can create talking points that appear to have more support than they actually do.

Twitter said it examined the timing of tweets and other indicators to determine whether an account was automated.

To establish whether an account was linked to Russia it looked for accounts that were associated with a Russian phone carrier or Russian email address, and whether the user's account name "contain[ed] a significant number of Cyrillic characters" and had logged in from any Russian IP address.

In total, it found 50,258 Russian-linked automated accounts that tweeted about the election in the last two months of the campaign and the week after the election.

The company said that it may not have identified all Russian-linked automated accounts as it said that 12% of all accounts created on the platform hide their location using virtual private networks.

Twitter sent the findings to the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 19.

The 50,000 accounts are in addition to 3,814 accounts the company found that were run by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian government-linked troll group based in St. Petersburg.

Many of those accounts were designed to look like they were run by real Americans and amassed tens of thousands of followers.

Earlier this month, Twitter said it would inform nearly 700,000 Americans they either followed or interacted with one of the Kremlin-linked troll accounts.

CNNMoney (New York) First published January 27, 2018: 4:08 PM ET

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Russian bots retweeted Trump nearly 500,000 times in final weeks of 2016 campaign

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The 50,000 automated accounts the company determined had ties to Russia sent more than 2 million election-related tweets between September 1 and November 15, 2016. The accounts retweeted then-candidate Donald Trump 10 times more than they retweeted his rival Hillary Clinton, according to Twitter's written statement to the committee.

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https://decisiondata.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/campaign-TV-mentions.png

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Graphs of distrust and satisfaction in the country

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The American public wants the government reformed and its power curtailed, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center. The survey found that Americans generally don't want government solutions for the nation's problems - and that favorability ratings for both major parties and Congress have reached record lows. Here, a breakdown of some key findings.

Trust & Satisfaction

Who's Angry?

By Administration

Distrust Of Institutions

Views Of Congress

Trust In Government And Views Of National Conditions

A dismal economy, an unhappy public, partisan-based backlash and discontent with Congress and elected officials have created what Pew calls "a perfect storm of conditions" associated with distrust of government. Just 22 percent of Americans say that they can trust the federal government almost always or most of the time, among the lowest measures in half a century.

Who's Angry At The Federal Government?

Intense anti-government views are concentrated among Republicans, independents who lean Republican and those who agree with the Tea Party movement, Pew found. Some 56 percent of those polled say they are "frustrated" with the federal government, findings that are in line with previous surveys. But the percentage of people who say they're "angry" with the government has doubled since 2000, to 21 percent. These attitudes could have an impact on the congressional elections in November: Independents who are frustrated with the government are committed to voting and say they favor Republican candidates over Democratic ones in their district 66 percent to 13 percent.

Trust In Government By Administration

Trust in government is typically higher among members of the party that controls the White House than among those in the "out" party. But Republicans' views of government change more dramatically than do Democrats', depending on which party is in control. This can be seen in the Obama era, where the president's policies, including overhauling the health care system, have upset Republicans. Only 13 percent of Republicans today say they can trust Washington to do the right thing.

Public's Negative Views Of Institutions Not Limited To Government

The public is discontent not only with the White House and Congress but also with many of the country's major institutions -- most notably, banks and other financial companies and the national news media.

Favorability Ratings For Congress Reach Record Lows

Congress and the major political parties face record discontent among Americans. Both the Democratic and Republican parties' favorable ratings are at their lowest point ever in Pew Research surveys. And favorable opinions of Congress have dropped to half of what they were a year ago. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed now say they have an unfavorable view of Congress, the lowest rating in 25 years.

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In Depth: Americans' Distrust Of Government

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The American public wants the government reformed and its power curtailed, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center. The survey found that Americans generally don't want government solutions for the nation's problems - and that favorability ratings for both major parties and Congress have reached record lows.

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With think American politics are bad. The social-democrat government in Sweden is pro child marriage, it took a unification of the other parties to finally stop recognition of child marriage.

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The Swedish parliament has voted to stop recognising child marriages despite parties from the governing coalition, including the Social Democrats, seeking some exemptions.

The new decree will mean that Sweden will no longer validate child marriages of migrants who get married in countries where the practice is tolerated, newspaper Aftonbladet reports.

The parliament has also called for the creation of new legislation that deals not only with child marriages but also with the 150 known polygamous marriages in the country, as well.

The decree to stop recognising all child marriages was not accepted by all parties within the parliament as the ruling Social Democrats requested exemptions for special cases.

Robert Hannah, a member of the Liberal Party and member of parliament, commented on the Social Democrats' proposal for exemptions on Twitter writing: "We demand a total ban on child marriage. It is shameful that the government wants to keep special grounds for child marriage. They are letting the girls down!"

Swedes on social media also expressed their outrage at the government parties with one Twitter user saying that the government stood "for bigamy and child marriage", and added: "It is important that all women out there get clear of what they perceive as feminist."

Migrant Child Brides As Young As 11 Arriving In Europe https://t.co/yZ097GJhIs pic.twitter.com/goIDeXF8ib

- Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 2, 2016

Since the migrant crisis in 2015, there have been several high-profile child marriage cases in Sweden involving recent migrants and asylum seekers.

In February last year, Swedish prosecutors dropped a criminal case involving a child marriage in which a Syrian man, who was 26 at the time, married a girl who was only 13 or 14 and raped her. The case was dismissed because the crime occurred in Syria rather than Sweden.

In October, Swedish authorities allowed a 14-year-old pregnant asylum seeker to live with her 25-year-old "husband" for months until she reported him to the police for raping her.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com

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Sweden Votes to Stop Recognising Child Marriage Despite Resistance from Government Parties

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The new decree will mean that Sweden will no longer validate child marriages of migrants who get married in countries where the practice is tolerated, newspaper Aftonbladet reports. The parliament has also called for the creation of new legislation that deals not only with child marriages but also with the 150 known polygamous marriages in the country, as well.

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Great article on understanding bias in the media, different types of bias, and how people look at it differently.

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For a time, "bias" was the term of choice to describe anything people hated about journalism, whether the power and influence of corporate news organizations to the choices reporters made in writing individual stories. In 2001, in fact, a book about media unfairness entitled "Bias" was number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

In recent years the public seems to have adopted a more nuanced view of bias. Perhaps this is because many critics have found their voice online - where studies confirm that half the blogs contain just the author's opinion - or that one-sidedness has become a successful business model, as Fox News Channel and MSNBC have demonstrated.

Journalists, nevertheless, often feel compelled to try to prove that they are "unbiased."

But what if they took a different approach? What if journalists acknowledged that bias does exist, that it is built into the choices they make when deciding what to leave in and what to leave out? That bias is embedded in the culture and language of the society on which the journalist reports? And that "news judgment" does reflect the journalist's background as well as the news organization's mission and business model?

What if the journalist said, in other words, that bias may not always be a bad thing? That it may serve to create narrative texture or make a story understandable.

What if journalists acknowledged that bias does exist, that it is built into the choices they make when deciding what to leave in and what to leave out?
" "

One can even argue that draining a story of all bias can drain it of its humanity, its lifeblood. In the biases of the community one can also find conflicting passions that bring stories to life.

A bias, moreover, can be the foundation for investigative journalism. It may prompt the news organization to right a wrong and take up an unpopular cause.

Thus, the job of journalists is not to stamp out bias. Rather, the journalist should learn how to manage it.

And to do that, the journalist needs to become conscious of the biases at play in a given story and decide when they are appropriate and may be useful, and when they are inappropriate.

Biases that journalists and their audiences probably consider appropriate are such things as a belief in representative government, open government, and social equality. Yet an unquestioning adherence to policies based on these principles might not always be the best thing. Is democracy, for example, the best form of government for all people in all places at all times? Should government not be allowed to have any secrets? How far should government go to promote social equality?

There are also biases that cut both ways.

Being a crusader against social ills is generally good, but you can lose perspective.

A bias toward official voices is necessary, but if it leaves out other voices it's a problem.

Being sensitive to sources is part of listening well but it can also mean that the journalist is writing for them rather than the public.

Looking for the extraordinary, the man-bites-dog story, can also lead a journalist to distort what is really going on or is important.

Subject: There is a bias built into the way journalists pick and cover stories. Certain subjects are routinely covered or ignored. Do some subjects or communities only appear when a crime occurs or when there is a special event or parade?

Boss: What stories are being done or overdone in order to please the boss?

Production: What stories are automatic because they are easy to do, but may be trivial or incremental? Or how often does a journalist call certain sources because they know the source will answer their phone or offer a perfect quote?

Against companies: Turning skepticism into negativity and the assumption that every big and successful institution must be doing something wrong.

There are also more subtle biases, but ones every journalist will recognize.

Market-oriented bias: This can be a pressure to produce stories that target market segments with desirable demographics for advertisers.

Covering the bases: This means doing the stories everyone else is going to have in order to cover the bases (and your rear end).

Balance is a long-honored notion, and can be a useful technique for a story that you may not know much about. But how many sides does it take to balance a story? Is a "balanced" story fair? Is it true to the facts? Should you still give equal space or weight to all sides?

Political bias is something journalists hear a lot about from the public, but inside the newsroom it's less a topic of conversation. Journalists don't ask and don't tell. They don't know each other's politics. So therefore it isn't a problem. But is that enough? Does not talking about something mean it isn't a problem?

There's another sort of bias worth mentioning, too.

It used to be called "pack journalism." It has also been called "group think." It is the story line that the press corps en masse is telling or repeating. A modern term for it is the master narrative. Bush was a strong leader. Or he was dumb.

These master narratives can become a kind of trap or rut. The journalist picks facts that illustrate a master narrative, or current stereotype, and ignores other facts.

In the end, making choices requires journalists to think. A journalist needs to be conscious of biases so he or she can know what biases make it into stories.
This guide, like many of the others in API's Journalism Essentials section, is largely based on the research and teachings of the Committee of Concerned Journalists - a consortium of reporters, editors, producers, publishers, owners and academics that for 10 years facilitated a discussion among thousands of journalists about what they did, how they did it, and why it was important. The author, Walter Dean, was CCJ training director and former API Executive Director Tom Rosenstiel who previously co-chaired the committee.

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Understanding bias - American Press Institute

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For a time, "bias" was the term of choice to describe anything people hated about journalism, whether the power and influence of corporate news organizations to the choices reporters made in writing individual stories. In 2001, in fact, a book about media unfairness entitled "Bias" was number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

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More Republicans than Democrats say they're angry with the government 32% v. 12%
Among those who called themselves conservative Republicans or Republican leaners, 68 % supported the idea of limiting how much individuals and organizations can spend

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Only 19 percent of Americans - about 1 in 5 - say they trust the government "always or most of the time," according to a study released by the Pew Research Center on Monday. Yet clear majorities also favor the government taking "a major role" in fighting terrorism, responding to natural disasters, keeping food and drugs safe, protecting the environment, strengthening the economy and improving education.

Despite this desire for government services, Americans are clearly dissatisfied with the level of service they feel they receive. Three out of four, 74 percent, say public officials put their own interests ahead of the nation's. And a majority, 55 percent, say ordinary Americans would "do a better job of solving problems" than the people whose job it is to do so.

Trust in government appears to have been higher half a century ago, at a time when the Cold War may have had more of a rallying effect on public opinion - along with the space program and high employment and general prosperity. A similar survey in 1964 found 77 percent of Americans trusted the government either always or most of the time.

Confidence in government has clearly suffered over the ensuing decades, with Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, various economic troubles, partisan gridlock in Washington and the recent frustrations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that is not to mention the myriad stories of administrative breakdowns, personnel problems and computer hacking.

The trust level generally trended downward after the mid-1960s in the National Election Study, and in polls by Gallup, the New York Times and other news organizations, descending below 30 percent for the first time in the late 1970s. The trust level percentage rose into the 40s at times during the middle part of Ronald Reagan's presidency, declined through most of George H.W. Bush's presidency and fell all the way to 20 percent during the second year of Bill Clinton's time in the White House. Thereafter, however, an improving economy helped the trust level recover again.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the trust level briefly got over 50 percent again. But it fell rapidly thereafter through the George W. Bush years and slipped below 20 percent during the presidency of Barack Obama. In 2011, the moving average of major polls including the Pew Research Poll showed trust at just 17 percent.
People trust their own parties more
In general, trust levels among Democrats have been higher when Democrats are in the White House, while Republicans have expressed more trust when Republicans were president. Four out of 5 Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) told Pew they prefer a smaller government with fewer services, while only 3 out of 10 said so among Democrats and Democratic leaners.

The Pew report is based on more than 6,000 interviews conducted in all 50 states between Aug. 27 and Oct. 4, 2015. That is a highly unusual sample in its size, which is five to 10 times larger than most of the polls often cited in the media. The Pew research also includes interviews done by cellphone, reaching a wider range of people than surveys done by landline phone or via the Internet.
More Republicans than Democrats say they're angry with the government
Republicans are nearly three times as likely as Democrats to say they are angry with the government - 32 percent vs. 12 percent. Among those who say they vote frequently and follow politics on a regular basis, the gap widens - 42 percent to 11 percent. GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson get higher favorable ratings among Republicans who say they are angry at government than they do among other Republicans.

What is more surprising is that the parties are much less divided on the desire for government to play a major role in providing various forms of security, roads and bridges, safety and disaster response. Four in 5 in both parties said the government should have a major role in managing immigration. Here are more findings from the survey:

Spending limits: Big majorities in both parties said they favored some kind of spending limits in U.S. elections. Among those who called themselves conservative Republicans or Republican leaners, 68 percent supported the idea of limiting how much individuals and organizations can spend.

Safety nets: On issues of the social safety net, however, the partisan divide reappears. Some 72 percent of the Democrats and their leaners saw a major role for the government in lifting people out of poverty; only about a third of Republicans did. The same gap appeared on the question of government ensuring access to quality health care.

Government reform: The survey found almost 60 percent of Americans think their government needs "major reform," a sharp increase from the late 1990s, when less than 40 percent of those surveyed said so.

Natural disasters: Government got its best marks in the latest Pew data for its performance on natural disasters, and setting fair and safe standards in workplaces. About half the respondents in each party said the federal government did a good job on roads and on ensuring access to high-quality education.

Government agencies: Individual government agencies also sometimes did better than one might expect. More than 80 percent of respondents were positive about the performance of the U.S. Postal Service. But just 39 percent have a favorable opinion of the scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs, which had almost a 70 percent positive rating in 2013.

Although the Pew study was focused on the federal government, it also found a majority, 56 percent, saying that large corporations have a negative impact on the country. A similar majority said the entertainment industry has a negative impact, and almost two-thirds, 65 percent, said the same thing about the national news media.

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Poll: 1 In 5 Americans Trusts The Government

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Only 19 percent of Americans - about 1 in 5 - say they trust the government "always or most of the time," according to a study released by the Pew Research Center on Monday. Yet clear majorities also favor the government taking "a major role" in fighting terrorism, responding to natural disasters, keeping food and drugs safe, protecting the environment, strengthening the economy and improving education.

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"There are so many reporters completely against Trump it's absurd," says Megyn Kelly of NBC. Chris Wallace of Fox News says Donald Trump has a point in claiming the media give him unfair treatment. A Harvard study showed the tone of Trump coverage has been twice as negative in the early going as that accorded his predecessor, Barack Obama. CNN panels, overly stacked with progressive analysts, rail against the President on a daily basis.

For the notion that the media are out to get him, the outlier President can find some backing. In response he tries, as Mr. Wallace puts it, to delegitimize the fourth estate more than any other president. He rails at the press, "the enemy of the people," on almost a daily basis. He has made "fake news" part of the vernacular. Last month he went so far as to tweet that the Senate Intelligence Committee should investigate why "so much news is made up."

The media did much to make Donald Trump. Recall in the Republican primaries how he got so much coverage, so many exploding headlines compared to other candidates, that he hardly had to spend money on advertising. Now he fears the media are so hostile they are unmaking him.

There is no doubting the power of the press. I've long held to the theory that a major reason the federal NDP has never made it and never will in Canada is because it has no institutional media support. Conservatives have the giant Postmedia/Sun chain to carry their banner, Liberals have Torstar and others to sing their song. The Dippers have squat.

But what of the Trump claim? Are he and his aggrieved right-side legions correct in their media lament? From the perspective of the volume of criticism, yes. In my four decades of covering politics, I've never seen anything comparable.

But what of it? Is media bias to be measured by the number of negative verdicts? Isn't the germane question whether or not the condemnation is justified? In sports, if the team fielded is woefully managed, performs shoddily, posts loss after loss, bad media reviews are the logical consequence. The Cleveland Browns, perennial flounderers in the National Football League, are a prime example. Their barrage of bad press isn't because of media bias.

In sport it is easier to render objective judgments, but not by much. In politics the people rate performance, and their verdict on Mr. Trump to date is like the media's. It's dismal. He's a mega-flop. For his first year they give him the worst approval ratings by far of any president, rankings reflected in woeful election results for the Republicans earlier this month.

Mr. Trump boasts of a bubbling economy. But is that because of any major reforms he has initiated, or is it the continuation of the trend in place before he took office? He takes credit for downgrading the Islamic State threat. But while he has given, perhaps wisely, more leeway to generals in the field, the success similarly flows from a military strategy already in place.

Much of the brutal press accorded to this President stems from his unprecedented torrent of falsehoods, lies and deliberate deceptions. They number, staggeringly, in the hundreds. While some are based on subjective measurements and can be disputed, the vast majority are demonstrably verifiable.

It is also difficult, you might say, for any president to garner favourable media coverage when he practises bigotry-laced politics that stoke the nation's racial divide; when he turns the Oval Office into an insult-peddling machine; when he starts a war with his own party establishment; when in the face of continual mass killings he supports the existing gun culture; when he claims climate change is a hoax.

Mr. Trump's blaming of the media for his woes is a smart political strategy. For one thing, it is one of the few defences he has. For another, there is always (Fox News, CNN) some media bias. For another, he has a gullible population to prey on.

As stated by Richard Gingras, the vice-president of news at Google and a creator of The Trust Project to build confidence in journalism, the root problem is that people look to the media for support of their biases, for "affirmation rather than information."

Mr. Trump wants affirmation. His record to date, as not only the press but also the people tell him, suggests he doesn't deserve it. Not while he's fielding a team like the one in Cleveland.

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The press vs. the President: Are the media biased against Trump?

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"There are so many reporters completely against Trump it's absurd," says Megyn Kelly of NBC. Chris Wallace of Fox News says Donald Trump has a point in claiming the media give him unfair treatment. A Harvard study showed the tone of Trump coverage has been twice as negative in the early going as that accorded his predecessor, Barack Obama.

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Good website that rates the bias of hundreds of media sites and news papers,  gives a brief explanation of their decision.

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May 18, 2017, 9:00 am
By Thomas E. Patterson
Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press

A new report from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzes news coverage of President Trump's first 100 days in office.

The report is based on an analysis of news reports in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, the main newscasts of CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, and three European news outlets (The UK's Financial Times and BBC, and Germany's ARD).
Findings include:

President Trump dominated media coverage in the outlets and programs analyzed, with Trump being the topic of 41 percent of all news stories-three times the amount of coverage received by previous presidents. He was also the featured speaker in nearly two-thirds of his coverage.

Republican voices 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.

European reporters were more likely than American journalists to directly question Trump's fitness for office.

Trump has received unsparing coverage for most weeks of his presidency, without a single major topic where Trump's coverage, on balance, was more positive than negative, setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.

Fox was the only news outlet in the study that came close to giving Trump positive coverage overall, however, there was variation in the tone of Fox's coverage depending on the topic.

This research is partially funded by Rebecca Donatelli, with special thanks to the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy.
Listen to Thomas Patterson discuss the report with Shorenstein Center director Nicco Mele on our Media and Politics Podcast. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio or Stitcher.

Introduction and Methodology

"The press is your enemy," said the president. "Enemies. Understand that? . . . Because they're trying to stick the knife right in our groin."

Donald Trump's ongoing feud with the media is not the first time a president has felt wronged by the press. The opening words are those of Richard Nixon. Virtually every president since Nixon has obsessed over what they've seen as unfair treatment by the press. In the first two years of his presidency, Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to enact a tax increase on upper incomes, a family leave program, NAFTA, deficit reduction, the Brady bill, a youth training program, and other initiatives, yet was mired in a slew of headlines about Travelgate, Whitewater, and other alleged wrongdoings. In a Rolling Stone interview, Clinton exploded at his treatment by the press: "I've fought more damn battles here than any president in 20 years with the possible exception of Reagan's first budget and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press. I am damn sick and tired of it."

What's different with President Trump is that he's taken the fight to the press, openly and with relish. Nixon worked largely behind the scenes, threatening to take away broadcasters' licenses if they didn't shape up. Ronald Reagan created what amounted to a White House news service, feeding stories directly to local news outlets in order to bypass the national press. George W. Bush extended that strategy, adding video feeds to the mix. Clinton and Barack Obama relied on one-on-one interviews with reporters in an effort to get out their side of the story. During his presidency, Obama held more than a thousand such interviews.

Trump's dislike of the press was slow in coming. When he announced his presidential candidacy, journalists embraced him, and he returned the favor. Trump received far more coverage, and far more positive coverage, than did his Republican rivals. Only after he had secured the Republican nomination did the press sharpen its scrutiny and, as his news coverage turned negative, Trump turned on the press. Trump tweeted that the "election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign." It's been a running battle ever since. On his 100 th day in office, he became the first president in more than three decades to skip the White House Correspondents Dinner, choosing instead to go to Pennsylvania for a rally with supporters. Said Trump: "I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from the Washington swamp spending my evening with all of you and with a much, much larger crowd and much better people."

This paper examines Trump's first 100 days in office, not through the lens of what he said about the news media, but what they reported about him. The research is based on news coverage in the print editions of three U.S. daily papers ( The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post), the main newscasts of four U.S. television networks (CBS Evening News, CNN's The Situation Room, Fox's Special Report, and NBC Nightly News), and three European news outlets ( Financial Times, based in London; BBC, Britain's public service broadcaster; and ARD, Germany's oldest public service broadcaster). The president's role as a global leader, and Trump's pledge to redefine that role, prompted the inclusion of European news in the study.

The newspaper analysis covers all sections except sports, obituaries, and letters to the editor. Op-eds and editorials are included, but letters from the public are not. For television, the analysis covers the full daily content of each network's major newscast. Network talk shows are not included. Except where individual news outlets are identified, the U.S. percentages presented in this paper are the combined averages for the seven U.S. news outlets whereas the European percentages are the combined averages for the three European news outlets.

The data for our studies are provided by Media Tenor, a firm that specializes in collecting and coding news content. Media Tenor's coding of print and television news stories is conducted by trained full-time employees who visually evaluate the content. Coding of individual actors (in this case, Trump) is done on a comprehensive basis, capturing all mentions of more than five lines (print) or five seconds (TV) of coverage. For each report, coders identify the source(s), topic(s), and tone.

Tone is judged from the perspective of the actor. Negative stories include stories where the actor is criticized directly. An example is a headline story where Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer criticized Trump when the Labor Department's April economic report showed that fewer jobs were created than had been predicted. Schumer was quoted as saying, in part: "Eleven weeks into his administration, we have seen nothing from President Trump on infrastructure, on trade, or on any other serious job-creating initiative." Negative stories also consist of stories where an event, trend, or development reflects unfavorably on the actor. Examples are the stories that appeared under the headlines "President Trump's approval rating hits a new low" and "GOP withdraws embattled health care bill, handing major setback to Trump, Ryan."

All Trump, All the Time

On national television, Trump was the topic of 41 percent of all news stories-three times the usual amount.

Until the early 1960s, news coverage of national politics divided rather evenly between Congress and the president. That situation began to shift in 1963, the year that the broadcast television networks expanded their evening newscasts to 30 minutes and hired the correspondents and camera crews needed to produce picture-driven news. With a national audience, the networks focused their coverage on the president who, in any case, was easier than Congress to capture on camera. Newspapers followed suit and, ever since, the president has received more coverage in the national press than all 535 members of Congress combined. The White House's dominance has been such that, on national television, the president typically accounts for roughly one-eighth of all news coverage.

Even by that standard, Trump's first 100 days were a landmark. On national television, Trump was the topic of 41 percent of all news stories-three times the usual amount. It was also the case that Trump did most of the talking (see Figure 1). He was the featured speaker in nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of his coverage. Members of the administration, including his press secretary, accounted for 11 percent of the sound bites. Other Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, accounted for 4 percent. Altogether, Republicans, inside and outside the administration, accounted for 80 percent of what newsmakers said about the Trump presidency.

For their part, Democrats did not have a large voice in Trump's coverage, accounting for only 6 percent of the sound bites. Participants in anti-Trump protests and demonstrations accounted for an additional 3 percent.

For their part, Democrats did not have a large voice in Trump's coverage, accounting for only 6 percent of the sound bites.

The media have been fascinated by Trump since the first days of his presidential candidacy. Our studies of 2016 presidential election coverage found that Trump received more news coverage than rival candidates during virtually every week of the campaign. The reason is clear enough. Trump is a journalist's dream. Reporters are tuned to what's new and different, better yet if it's laced with controversy. Trump delivers that type of material by the shovel full. Trump is also good for business. News ratings were slumping until Trump entered the arena. Said one network executive, "[Trump] may not be good for America, but [he's] damn good for [us]."

Immigration, Health Care, Russia, and the Rest

Given the number of tasks facing an incoming administration, it is no surprise that Trump's news coverage during his first 100 days in office touched on an array of topics (see Figure 2). Immigration was the most heavily covered topic, accounting for 17 percent of Trump's coverage. Health care ranked second (12 percent), followed by the terrorism threat (9 percent), and Russia's involvement in the 2016 election (6 percent). Presidential appointments, global trade, Trump's family and personal life, and the economy were the other topics that received 4 percent or more of the coverage.

Compared with American journalists, [European reporters] were more likely to question directly Trump's fitness for office.

The seven U.S. news outlets in our study had similar agendas. Each of them devoted considerable attention to immigration, health care, and the terrorist threat. Nevertheless, there were some measurable differences. Our print outlets devoted proportionally more attention to the immigration issue and Trump appointees while the TV outlets devoted proportionally more attention to the health care issue. Fox News was an outlier on one topic-Russia's meddling in the U.S. election. Fox gave it less than half as much attention as it received on average from the other six U.S. outlets.

The European media's coverage of Trump had a somewhat different focus (see Figure 3). Although, like their American counterparts, immigration was at the top of the agenda, they gave relatively more space to international trade, military, and foreign policy issues, a reflection of the extent to which Europe is affected by U.S. policies in these areas. On the other hand, Russia's interference in the U.S. election received considerably less attention in the European media than in the U.S. media.

European reporters stood out in another way as well. Compared with American journalists, they were more likely to question directly Trump's fitness for office. For the most part, U.S. journalists worked around the edges of that issue, as when one of them reported that "Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) suggested Sunday that he thought President Trump was suffering from poor mental health and claimed some of his Republican colleagues felt the same way." Only 3 percent of Trump's U.S. coverage explicitly explored the issue of Trump's fitness for office. European journalists were less restrained with the exception of BBC journalists, who are governed by impartiality rules that prohibit such reporting. Journalists at ARD, Germany's main public broadcasting outlet, are not governed by the same rules, and Trump's suitability for the presidency was ARD's leading topic in January, accounting for a full fifth (20 percent) of its Trump coverage. ARD stayed on the issue in its February coverage, when it consumed 18 percent of its Trump coverage. In March and April, Trump's fitness for office got less attention from ARD, but it nonetheless accounted for about 10 percent of ARD's coverage. Even that reduced amount exceeded the level of any of our seven U.S. outlets in any month. And ARD's journalists were unequivocal in their judgment-98 percent of their evaluations of Trump's fitness for office were negative, only 2 percent were positive.

Trump's first 100 days were nearing their end when Russian meddling in the French presidential election was becoming a major issue. If the French election had come earlier, it's conceivable that the European media would have given more coverage to Russia's involvement in the U.S. election.

Bad News, Twice Over

Trump's coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity.

Presidents are more than the main focus of U.S. reporters. Presidents are also their main target. Although journalists are accused of having a liberal bias, their real bias is a preference for the negative. News reporting turned sour during the Vietnam and Watergate era and has stayed that way. Journalists' incentives, everything from getting their stories on the air to acquiring a reputation as a hard-hitting reporter, encourage journalists to focus on what's wrong with politicians rather than what's right. Once upon a time, the "honeymoon" period for a newly inaugurated president included favorable press coverage. That era is now decades in the past. Today's presidents can expect rough treatment at the hands of the press, and Donald Trump is no exception (see Figure 4). Of the past four presidents, only Barack Obama received favorable coverage during his first 100 days, after which the press reverted to form. During his second 100 days, Obama's coverage was 57 percent negative to 43 percent positive.

Trump's coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity. Of news reports with a clear tone, negative reports outpaced positive ones by 80 percent to 20 percent. Trump's coverage was unsparing. In no week did the coverage drop below 70 percent negative and it reached 90 percent negative at its peak (see Figure 5). The best period for Trump was week 12 of his presidency, when he ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase in retaliation for the Assad regime's use of nerve gas on civilians. That week, his coverage divided 70 percent negative to 30 percent positive. Trump's worst periods were weeks 3 and 4 (a combined 87 percent negative) when federal judges struck down his first executive order banning Muslim immigrants, and weeks 9 and 10 (a combined 88 percent negative) when the House of Representatives was struggling without success to muster the votes to pass a "repeal and replace" health care bill.

In Unison, Almost

Fox was the only outlet where Trump's overall coverage nearly crept into positive territory...Fox's coverage was 34 percentage points less negative than the average for the other six outlets.

Trump's attacks on the press have been aimed at what he calls the "mainstream media." Six of the seven U.S. outlets in our study-CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post-are among those he's attacked by name. All six portrayed Trump's first 100 days in highly unfavorable terms (see Figure 6). CNN and NBC's coverage was the most unrelenting-negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks. Trump's coverage on CBS also exceeded the 90 percent mark. Trump's coverage exceeded the 80 percent level in The New York Times (87 percent negative) and The Washington Post (83 percent negative). The Wall Street Journal came in below that level (70 percent negative), a difference largely attributable to the Journal 's more frequent and more favorable economic coverage.

Fox was the only outlet where Trump's overall coverage nearly crept into positive territory-52 percent of Fox's reports with a clear tone were negative, while 48 percent were positive. Fox's coverage was 34 percentage points less negative than the average for the other six outlets.

Trump's news coverage in the three European news outlets tilted strongly in the negative direction. Of the three, the BBC provided Trump with his best coverage, though only in relative terms. BBC's coverage ran 3-to-1 negative over positive. The Financial Times' reporting was roughly 6-to-1 negative over positive. Germany's ARD portrayed Trump in deeply unfavorable terms-98 percent of its Trump-based stories with a clear tone were negative.

Negative on All Counts

Trump's coverage during his first 100 days was not merely negative in overall terms. It was unfavorable on every dimension. There was not a single major topic where Trump's coverage was more positive than negative (see Figure 7).

Immigration was, at once, both the most heavily covered topic in U.S. news outlets and the topic that drew the most negative coverage. The proportion of negative news reports to positive ones exceeded 30-to-1. Health care reform and Russia's election involvement were also subject to starkly negative coverage-in each case, the breakdown was 87 percent negative to 13 percent positive. International trade, Trump's personal background, foreign and defense issues, Trump's appointees, and Trump's fitness for office were the other topics where the coverage was at least 80 percent negative.

The economy provided Trump with his most favorable coverage. Sources of positive stories were upward trends in economic growth, employment, and the stock market, as were Trump's negotiations with firms threatening to relocate abroad. Nevertheless, when the full range of news about the economy is taken into account, the balance of coverage was slightly unfavorable-54 percent of reports were negative, while 46 percent were positive.

When Trump's category-by-category coverage was examined for each of the seven U.S. news outlets in our study, a consistent pattern emerged. The sources of Trump's most and least negative coverage were similar for every outlet, except for Fox News, as will be described in the next section.

The Wall Street Journal 's coverage less closely resembled Fox's coverage than it did that of the other news outlets in our study. The main difference between their coverage and the Journal's was on the issue of the economy. The Journal gave it more coverage, which, on balance, was more positive than negative. It was the only news category in which the Journal's coverage was in positive territory. In the case of the other outlets, except Fox, no category had a positive balance of coverage.

A Ray of Sunshine

Trump had a few moments during his first 100 days when all the news outlets in our study gave him positive press, none more so than when he launched cruise missile strikes on a Syrian airbase.

Fox was the only news outlet in our study that came close to giving Trump positive coverage overall-the split was 52 percent negative to 48 percent positive. But Fox's coverage varied widely by topic, ranging from highly negative to highly positive (Figure 8). As was true at the other outlets, Fox's reporters found few good things to say about the public and judicial response to Trump's executive orders banning Muslim immigrants or the collapse of the House of Representatives' first attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare. Fox's reporting on Trump's appointees and Russian involvement in the election was also negative in tone.

On the other hand, trade and terrorism were news categories where Fox's coverage was starkly different from that of the other outlets. Whereas their coverage in these areas tipped strongly in the negative direction, Fox's coverage tipped strongly positive.

Trump's suitability for the presidency was also a topic where Fox News was at odds with what the other outlets were reporting (see Figure 9). Fox was the only U.S. outlet where news reports that spoke directly to Trump's fitness for office were positive on balance. The ratio on Fox was 2-to-1 favorable. The other outlets averaged 6-to-1 unfavorable, with the range varying from 24-to-1 unfavorable to 4-to-1 unfavorable.

Trump had a few moments during his first 100 days when all the news outlets in our study gave him positive press, none more so than when he launched cruise missile strikes on a Syrian airbase. Although some critics questioned Trump's larger objective in ordering the strikes, his action was widely praised in the policy community, including many top Democrats (see Figure 10). In this instance, the tone of the other news outlets aligned with Fox's-in each case, positive stories outnumbered negative ones by 4-1 (see Figure 10).

Thoughts on Trump's Coverage

...the fact that Trump has received more negative coverage than his predecessor is hardly surprising. 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.

Trump's coverage during his first 100 days was negative even by the standards of today's hyper-critical press. Studies of earlier presidents found nothing comparable to the level of unfavorable coverage afforded Trump. Should it continue, it would exceed even that received by Bill Clinton. There was not a single quarter during any year of Clinton's presidency where his positive coverage exceeded his negative coverage, a dubious record no president before or since has matched. Trump can't top that string of bad news but he could take it to a new level. During his first 100 days, Clinton's coverage was 3-to-2 negative over positive. Trump's first 100 days were 4-to-1 negative over positive.

Have the mainstream media covered Trump in a fair and balanced way? That question cannot be answered definitively in the absence of an agreed-upon version of "reality" against which to compare Trump's coverage. Any such assessment would also have to weigh the news media's preference for the negative, a tendency in place long before Trump became president. Given that tendency, the fact that Trump has received more negative coverage than his predecessor is hardly surprising. 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.

What's truly atypical about Trump's coverage is that it's sharply negative despite the fact that he's the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage. Typically, newsmakers and groups complain that their media narrative is negative because they're not given a chance to speak for themselves. Over the past decade, U.S. coverage of Muslims has been more than 75 percent negative. And Muslims have had little chance to tell their side of the story. Muslims account for less than 5 percent of the voices heard in news reports about Islam. So why is Trump's coverage so negative even though he does most of the talking? The fact is, he's been on the defensive during most of his 100 days in office, trying to put the best face possible on executive orders, legislative initiatives, appointments, and other undertakings that have gone bad. Even Fox has not been able to save him from what analyst David Gergen called the "'worst 100 days we've ever seen."

Nevertheless, 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. As he tweeted a month after taking office, "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!"

That tweet made headlines, as have many of Trump's attacks on the press. It's understandable why journalists would report and respond to such attacks, but it could be counterproductive. A long-running battle in which Trump accuses the press of trafficking in fake news while journalists reply that their news is anything but fake would probably, fairly or not, weaken the public's confidence in the press. Research has found that familiarity with a claim increases the likelihood people will believe it, whether it's true or not. The more they hear of something, the more likely they are to believe it.

If a mud fight with Trump will not serve the media's interests, neither will a soft peddling of his coverage. Never in the nation's history has the country had a president with so little fidelity to the facts, so little appreciation for the dignity of the presidential office, and so little understanding of the underpinnings of democracy. The media's credibility today is at low ebb, but the Trump presidency is not the time for the press to pull back. The news media gave Trump a boost when he entered presidential politics. But a head-on collision at some point was inevitable. It's happened, it isn't pretty, and it isn't over.

...except for his court-challenged immigration orders, the press paid only minimal attention to Trump's executive orders...Collectively, these orders, immigration aside, accounted for less than 1 percent of Trump's coverage, and rarely did a news report track an executive order into the agencies to see how it was being handled.

At the same time, the news media need to give Trump credit when his actions warrant it. The public's low level of confidence in the press is the result of several factors, one of which is a belief that journalists are biased. That perception weakens the press's watchdog role. One of the more remarkable features of news coverage of Trump's first 100 days is that it has changed few minds about the president, for better or worse. The nation's watchdog has lost much of its bite and won't regain it until the public perceives it as an impartial broker, applying the same reporting standards to both parties. The news media's exemplary coverage of Trump's cruise missile strike on Syria illustrates the type of even-handedness that needs to be consistently and rigorously applied.

How might the press better navigate the days ahead? For starters, journalists need to keep their eye on the ball. We live in a fast-paced media era, as journalists rush to be at the crest of breaking news. Through his tweets and actions, Trump exploits this habit, enabling him to change the subject when it suits his needs. During the presidential campaign, that tactic enabled him to shed a number of damaging revelations before many voters had a chance to hear about them, much less think about them.

The press should also start doing what it hasn't done well for a long time-focus on policy effects. Journalists' focus on the Washington power game-who's up and who's down, who's getting the better of whom-can be a fascinating story but at the end of the day, it's food for political junkies. It's remote enough from the lives of most Americans to convince them that the political system doesn't speak for them, or to them.

A broadening of the scope of political coverage would require journalists to spend less time peering at the White House. Our analysis of news coverage of Trump's first 100 days found that, except for his court-challenged immigration orders, the press paid only minimal attention to Trump's executive orders. He issued a large number of them, covering everything from financial regulation to climate change. Collectively, these orders, immigration aside, accounted for less than 1 percent of Trump's coverage, and rarely did a news report track an executive order into the agencies to see how it was being handled.

Since Trump's inauguration, the press has been paying more attention to Main Street. But judging from the extent to which Trump's voice has dominated coverage of his presidency, the balance is still off. More voices need to be aired.

Journalists would also do well to spend less time in Washington and more time in places where policy intersects with people's lives. If they had done so during the presidential campaign, they would not have missed the story that keyed Trump's victory-the fading of the American Dream for millions of ordinary people. Nor do all such narratives have to be a tale of woe. America at the moment is a divided society in some respects, but it's not a broken society and the divisions in Washington are deeper than those beyond the Beltway.

The lesson of the 2016 election has been taken to heart by many journalists. Since Trump's inauguration, the press has been paying more attention to Main Street. But judging from the extent to which Trump's voice has dominated coverage of his presidency, the balance is still off. More voices need to be aired. Trump might be good for ratings but he's not the only voice worth hearing. Never have journalists fixated on a single newsmaker for as long as they have on Trump. If he sees journalists as his main opponents, one reason is that between Trump and themselves there's not much air time for everyone else. Journalists need to resist even the smallest temptation to see themselves as opponents of government. It's the competition between the party in power and the opposing party, and not between government and the press, that's at the core of the democratic process. When spokespersons for the opposing party get a mere 6 percent of the airtime, something's amiss.

[1] Nancy Benac, "Remember Nixon: There's History Behind Trump's Attacks on the Press," Associated Press, February 17, 2017. The quote was originally reported by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. https://apnews.com/8b29195631f44033ad94d8b2b74048c0/remember-nixon-theres-history-behind-trumps-press-attacks

[2] Quoted in Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 245.

[4] Thomas E. Patterson, "Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump's Rise, Sanders' Emergence, Clinton's Struggle," Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, June 13, 2016. http://shorensteincenter.org/pre-primary-news-coverage-2016-trump-clinton-sanders/

[5] Thomas E. Patterson, "News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences," Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, July 11, 2016. http://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidential-primaries/

[6] Trump tweet, October 16, 2016.

[7] See Stephen J. Farnsworth, S. Robert Lichter, and Roland Schatz, The Global President: International Media and the US Government (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

[8] Allan Smith, "Schumer rips Trump after underwhelming jobs report: He's 'failed to deliver' on his economic promises," Business Insider, April 7, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/schumer-rips-trump-march-jobs-report-2017-4

[11] Richard Davis, "News Coverage of National Political Institutions," Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1986, p. 58.

[12] See, for example, Stephen J. Farnsworth and Robert S. Lichter, The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 29-58.

[13] Estimated from data in Jeffrey E. Cohen, The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 33.

[14] One indicator of Trump's dominance is MediaQuant's analysis. It records the number of times a newsmaker's name is mentioned and then compares the relative amount of attention each of them receives. In January, 2017, Trump broke MediaQuant's record for the most news attention afforded a newsmaker. Excluding outgoing President Barack Obama, Trump got more coverage than the next 1000 most heavily covered newsmakers combined.

[15] Media Tenor, January 20-April 29, 2017. Based on combined average for CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC.

[16] Thomas E. Patterson, "News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters," Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, December 7, 2016. https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-election/

[17] See, for example, John Koblinian, "Trump's First Days in White House Keep Cable News Ratings Strong," The New York Times, January 31, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/business/media/trumps-first-days-in-white-house-keep-cable-news-ratings-strong.html?_r=0

[18] CBS CEO Les Moonves, February 29, 2016.

[19] Media Tenor has several hundred topic categories that are applied to news reports. The graphs and percentages reported in this paper are based on all categories that received more than 0.5 percent of the coverage.

[21] Helen Boaden, draft paper, untitled, comparing U.S. and BBC journalism norms, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, May 6, 2017. Expected publication date of summer, 2017.

[22] See, for example, Patricia Moy and Michael Pfau, With Malice Toward All? (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000).

[23] Thomas E. Patterson, The Vanishing Voter (New York: Knopf, 2002), 70.

[25] Cohen, The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News, 35.

[27] There were a few marginal differences of note in the amount of attention Fox gave to various issues. Fox gave somewhat more news attention to health care and presidential appointments and somewhat less attention to immigration than did the other news outlets.

[29] Center for Media and Public Affairs, Media Monitor, various dates.

[30] Farnsworth and Lichter, The Mediated Presidency, p. 37.

[31] The content and data for the Muslim example, as well as the suggestion to compare it to Trump, were provided to the author in an email on May 15, 2017 from Roland Schatz, CEO of Media Tenor. The data cited are those of Media Tenor.

[32] Gergen spoke those words on CNN, March 24, 2017.

[33] Examples: Michael M. Grynbaum, "Trump Calls the News Media the 'Enemy of the American People,'" The New York Times, February 17, 2017; Jenna Johnson and Matea Gold, "Trump calls the news media 'the enemy of the American People,'" Chicago Tribune, February 17, 2017.

[34] In forming their opinions, rather than through careful study, people typically rely on heuristics, as when they adopt an opinion because a trusted friend holds it. As it turns out, "familiarity" is a heuristic for many people, which is why a claim that is heard repeatedly is more likely to be believed than one that people find unfamiliar. The extent to which this is true was documented in research presented by Gordon Pennycook's presentation at the Fake News Conference held at Harvard University on February 17, 2017. https://shorensteincenter.org/combating-fake-news-agenda-for-research/

[35] The classic analysis of the role of political parties in democratic government is E.E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Rinehart, 1942), p. 1.

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News Coverage of Donald Trump's First 100 Days - Shorenstein Center

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A new report from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzes news coverage of President Trump's first 100 days in office. The report is based on an analysis of news reports in the print editions...

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A little something for y’all to read over break(:

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Example of Media Bias:

An Obama campaign media director tweeted on Sunday that Facebook was "on our side" during President Obama's reelection bid.

"They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side," Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, tweeted Sunday.

Davidsen said Facebook allowed her team to gather massive amounts of personal information from its users and their friends because they were supportive of the Obama campaign.

(from a March 20 post by Don Irvine at Accuracy in Media)

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Example of Media Bias: An Obama campaign media director tweeted on Sunday that Facebook was "on our side" during President Obama's reelection bid. "They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side," Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, tweeted Sunday.

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By

Are we even aware of our biases anymore?

If you look at this chart and are convinced your "extreme" source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today.

"In the past, national evening news programs, local evening news programs, and the front pages of print newspapers were dominated by fact-reporting stories," says the chart's creator, patent attorney Vanessa Otero. "Now, however, many sources people consider to be 'news sources' are actually dominated by analysis and opinion pieces."

She released the first version of the chart back in 2016, and she's updated it several times since. Over the past year, it's gone viral, with thousands of educators at both the high school and college levels using the compelling visual. She says she's "shocked" by all the attention it's received and still gets requests every day.

Otero also talked about why such bias is so troubling.

"I think the extremes are very toxic and damaging to the country," she explained to MarketWatch. "These extreme sources play on people's worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people's confirmation biases."

And with that, let the backlash over the latest version begin.

Obviously, to many conservatives, Fox News, home to the guy Carter Page describes as this generation's "Edward R. Murrow," has no business on the fringe. And the fact that CNN's bordering the neutral zone is sure to rankle Trump fans.

Then there's Infowars, which Otero deems "nonsense damaging to public discourse." Infowars, after the chart first surfaced, responded with one of its own:

Infowars, run by Alex Jones, wrote that the chart is an example of the "dying dinosaur media's extreme liberal bias" and that it unfairly "demonizes" independent media. Here's just one example of how Infowars shows off its independence:

"If you have just a couple sources that you think are in the middle but none exist either to the right or left of them, or up or down from them, you may be on the wrong track," Otero said, adding that MarketWatch will make the next update.

But where?

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How biased is your news source? You probably won't agree with this chart

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By Are we even aware of our biases anymore? If you look at this chart and are convinced your "extreme" source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today.

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The 2016 presidential election made the question of media credibility in America central to political discussions - mainstream media bias and the influence of so-called "fake news" have been hotly debated over the past year.

And recent surveys have shown that many of the biggest US news outlets aren't very trusted across the board, and the right is especially skeptical of mainstream media.

News outlets like CNN and ABC News might have the biggest audiences, but the most trusted news outlets in America are actually British, according to a 2014 study from Pew Research Center.

BBC and The Economist top the list of outlets that are trusted by every ideological group, while BuzzFeed and The Rush Limbaugh Show are at the bottom.

Check out the chart:

Conservative-leaning news outlets seem to be the least trusted among those with a mixed political ideology. Liberal-leaning outlets like Mother Jones and ThinkProgress also rank lower than major media players like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

The news outlets that are considered trustworthy by every ideological group don't equate to the most popular outlets, however. Americans say they get most of their political news from local TV, Facebook, and major networks like CNN and Fox News.

CNN and Fox News both had a high trust rating overall, but there is more of a dispute between ideological groups about whether they're trustworthy. For example, 88% of consistent conservatives said they trust Fox News, but only 14% said they trust CNN.

For the study, Pew surveyed a representative sample of randomly selected Americans, polling nearly 3,000 people in 2014.

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These are the most and least trusted news outlets in America

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The 2016 presidential election made the question of media credibility in America central to political discussions - mainstream media bias and the influence of so-called "fake news" have been hotly debated over the past year. And recent surveys have shown that many of the biggest US news outlets aren't very trusted across the board, and the right is especially skeptical of mainstream media.

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Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

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Overview

For the second time in a decade, the believability ratings for major news organizations have suffered broad-based declines. In the new survey, positive believability ratings have fallen significantly for nine of 13 news organizations tested. This follows a similar downturn in positive believability ratings that occurred between 2002 and 2004.

The falloff in credibility affects news organizations in most sectors: national newspapers, such as the New York Times and USA Today, all three cable news outlets, as well as the broadcast TV networks and NPR.

Across all 13 news organizations included in the survey, the average positive believability rating (3 or 4 on a 4-point scale) is 56%. In 2010, the average positive rating was 62%. A decade ago, the average rating for the news organizations tested was 71%. Since 2002, every news outlet's believability rating has suffered a double-digit drop, except for local daily newspapers and local TV news. The New York Times was not included in this survey until 2004, but its believability rating has fallen by 13 points since then.

These are among the major findings of a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted July 19-22 among 1,001 adults. The survey asks people to rate individual news organizations on believability using a 4-point scale. A rating of 4 means someone believes "all or most" of what the news organization says; a rating of 1 means someone believes "almost nothing" of what they say.

The believability ratings for individual news organizations - like views of the news media generally - have long been divided along partisan lines. But partisan differences have grown as Republicans' views of the credibility of news outlets have continued to erode. Today, there are only two news organizations - Fox News and local TV news - that receive positive believability ratings from at least two-thirds of Republicans. A decade ago, there were only two news organizations that did not get positive ratings from at least two-thirds of Republicans. By contrast, Democrats generally rate the believability of news organizations positively; majorities of Democrats give all the news organizations tested ratings of 3 or 4 on the 4-point scale, with the exception of Fox News.

Current Believability Ratings

The Pew Research Center has asked about the believability of individual news organizations for more than two decades. During this period, the Center also has asked separately about the news media's overall performance; ratings for the news media's accuracy, fairness and other aspects of performance also have shown long-term declines. (For the most recent report, see "Press Widely Criticized, But Trusted More than Other Information Sources," Sept. 22, 2011.)

The believability measures are based on those who give each news organization a rating. Roughly one-in-five are unable to rate the believability of NPR (21%), the New York Times (19%), the Wall Street Journal (19%) and USA Today (17%).

As in past believability surveys, local TV news and the CBS News program 60 Minutes receive the most positive ratings. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of those able to rate local TV news give it a rating of 3 or 4. Ratings are comparable for 60 Minutes (64% 3 or 4).

Despite the declines in believability, majorities continue to give most news organizations ratings of 3 or 4. However, ratings are mixed for NPR, MSNBC, the New York Times, Fox News and USA Today. About half give each of these news organizations believability ratings of 3 or 4; approximately the same percentages give them ratings of 1 or 2.

Believability of News Organizations: 2002-2012

Positive believability ratings for the New York Times have fallen by nine points since 2010, from 58% to 49%. The decline has been comparable for USA Today. Two years ago, 56% rated USA Today's believability at 3 or 4; today 49% do so.

About six-in-ten (58%) rate the Wall Street Journal's believability positively. That is little changed since 2010 (62%), but in 2002, 77% rated the Journal's believability at 3 or 4 on the 4-point scale.

Perceptions of the believability of the daily newspaper "you are most familiar with" are about the same as they were two years ago. Currently, 57% give their daily newspaper a positive believability rating, which is little changed from 2010 (59%).

Believability ratings for all three major cable news outlets have declined since 2010. MSNBC's believability rating has fallen from 60% to 50%, while the percentages giving CNN and Fox News believability ratings of 3 or 4 have declined seven points each, to 58% and 49%, respectively. In 2002, the ratings for all three cable news outlets were considerably higher - 76% for CNN, 73% for MSNBC and 67% for Fox News.

The believability ratings for local TV news are higher than those for the three cable news outlets. Currently, 65% give local news a rating of 3 or 4. Since 2002, credibility ratings for local TV news have remained more stable than have ratings for the three main cable news outlets.

There also have been slight declines since 2010 in believability ratings for the three major TV networks - ABC News, CBS News and NBC News. Over the past decade, positive ratings for all three have fallen from the low 70s to the mid- to high-50s. More than six-in-ten (64%) give the CBS weekly newsmagazine 60 Minutes believability ratings of 3 or 4. That is down 13 points since 2002.

Since 2010, the percentage giving NPR believability ratings of 3 or 4 has dropped eight points to 52%. NPR's believability ratings had changed little from 2002 to 2010; about six-in-ten in each year rated NPR's believability positively.

Partisan Gaps in Credibility Ratings

Republicans have long held a more negative view of the credibility of the news media than Democrats and this continues to be reflected in current assessments of news outlets. Republicans rate the believability of nine of 13 news organizations less positively than do Democrats. Fox News is the only news organization that is rated higher for believability by Republicans (67% of Republicans vs. 37% of Democrats). However, the percentage of Republicans giving Fox a believability rating of 3 or 4 has fallen 10 points, from 77%, since 2010.

Partisan differences in believability ratings are more pronounced for broadcast and cable TV news organizations, with more modest gaps for most newspapers.

More than twice as many Democrats as Republicans rate MSNBC's believability positively (69% vs. 32%). The differences are about as large in views of the believability of CNN and the three broadcast networks.

The partisan divide in views of the New York Times' believability also is substantial; 65% of Democrats, but just 37% of Republicans, rate the believability of the Times at 3 or 4. However, there are smaller differences in views of other newspapers. More Democrats (65%) than Republicans (49%) give positive ratings for the newspaper they know best, but about as many Republicans as Democrats rate the believability of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today positively.

A majority of Democrats (59%) give NPR a believability rating of 3 or 4. That compares with 48% of Republicans.

The partisan differences in views of the believability of most news organizations have increased greatly since 2002. For example, the partisan gap in believability of each of the cable networks was only about 10 points a decade ago; today, the gaps in believability ratings for Fox News, MSNBC and CNN are at least 30 points.

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Further Decline in Credibility Ratings for Most News Organizations

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For the second time in a decade, the believability ratings for major news organizations have suffered broad-based declines. In the new survey, positive believability ratings have fallen significantly for nine of 13 news organizations tested. This follows a similar downturn in positive believability ratings that occurred between 2002 and 2004.

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Are we even aware of our biases anymore?

If you look at this chart and are convinced your "extreme" source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today.

"In the past, national evening news programs, local evening news programs, and the front pages of print newspapers were dominated by fact-reporting stories," says the chart's creator, patent attorney Vanessa Otero. "Now, however, many sources people consider to be 'news sources' are actually dominated by analysis and opinion pieces."

She released the first version of the chart back in 2016, and she's updated it several times since. Over the past year, it's gone viral, with thousands of educators at both the high school and college levels using the compelling visual. She says she's "shocked" by all the attention it's received and still gets requests every day.

Otero also talked about why such bias is so troubling.

"I think the extremes are very toxic and damaging to the country," she explained to MarketWatch. "These extreme sources play on people's worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people's confirmation biases."

And with that, let the backlash over the latest version begin.

Obviously, to many conservatives, Fox News, home to the guy Carter Page describes as this generation's "Edward R. Murrow," has no business on the fringe. And the fact that CNN's bordering the neutral zone is sure to rankle Trump fans.

Then there's Infowars, which Otero deems "nonsense damaging to public discourse." Infowars, after the chart first surfaced, responded with one of its own:

Infowars, run by Alex Jones, wrote that the chart is an example of the "dying dinosaur media's extreme liberal bias" and that it unfairly "demonizes" independent media. Here's just one example of how Infowars shows off its independence:

"If you have just a couple sources that you think are in the middle but none exist either to the right or left of them, or up or down from them, you may be on the wrong track," Otero said, adding that MarketWatch will make the next update.

But where?

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How biased is your news source? You probably won't agree with this chart

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Are we even aware of our biases anymore? If you look at this chart and are convinced your "extreme" source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today.

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An example of current media bias ⬇️
https://www.studentnewsdaily.com/example-of-media-bias/in-spite-of-good-news/

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Example of Media Bias:

February job gains came in at a whopping 313,000 new jobs, so much that NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt acknowledged it "blows away economists' expectations." The Wall Street Journal said expectations were at only 205,000. Unemployment also remained at the 17-year-low of 4.1 percent. But only one network gave the good news any serious attention.

In spite of a jobs report that U.S. News & World Report said was the "single best month since mid-2016," both NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight failed to do a full story on the jobs situation. Those shows chose to include fairly short anchor reads of the numbers, spending 15 seconds (Nightly News) and 24 seconds (World News Tonight) respectively.

The coverage of both was dwarfed by CBS's reporting on Evening News March 9. That Evening News report was more than four times as long as coverage on ABC's World News Tonight, and more than seven times as long as NBC's Nightly News.

Anchor Jeff Glor introduced that 111 second report by noting that Wall Street gave the jobs report a "thumbs up" - the Dow had rallied more than 440 points that day. The positive economic story by national correspondent Jim Axelrod included financial contributor Mellody Hobson.

Hobson told CBS viewers "the fundamentals are very strong right now in our economy, and all indications are really solid."

Axelrod told viewers "the latest fuel for optimism," was that day's jobs report which showed the most construction jobs gains in 11 years, and strong hiring in retail and financial services - the "largest increase there since 2005."

He also cited the impact of the corporate tax cuts and "regulation rollbacks." Hobson backed him up saying the "benefit" of the tax cuts were "being felt by American businesses, and then as a follow on effect by American workers."
...
ABC's World News Tonight remains dead last of the three network evening shows covering employment. It had the least amount of Friday jobs coverage between Feb. 3, 2017, (the January 2017 jobs report) and the March 9, 2018 BLS release of February 2018 jobs.

World News Tonight spent just 4 minutes and 53 seconds combined on jobs those nights. NBC's Nightly News spent almost twice that with 9 minutes and 44 seconds, while CBS' Evening News devoted the most time to the subject those nights with 11 minutes 10 seconds of reporting.
Report by Julia A. Seymour, MRC Business, March 12, 2018
Methodology: MRC Business has been tracking the amount of time spent on jobs or employment news on the Friday of each month that the Commerce Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics announces the latest data. This time tally only reflects the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts on those specific nights.

Questions

1. What type of media bias is highlighted in the post?

2. Why should the networks have spent significant time this story? Why is the jobs report newsworthy?
Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the answers.
Answer(s)

1. The post illustrates bias by story selection and omission.

2. It is newsworthy because the topic has been such a big story. If you read/watch news reports on the job President Trump is doing, stories imply that he is not successful. The jobs report is fantastic news for Americans. The media's job is to report the whole story, not just the narrative they want it to be. The networks have a responsibility to inform viewers of important events. This is especially true for senior citizens - many of whom regularly watch NBC, ABC or CBS to get their news. If it is not reported on these news shows, they don't hear about it.

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Example of Media Bias: February job gains came in at a whopping 313,000 new jobs, so much that NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt acknowledged it "blows away economists' expectations." The Wall Street Journal said expectations were at only 205,000. Unemployment also remained at the 17-year-low of 4.1 percent.

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Article on the authors that built the chart that Swan posted.

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Are we even aware of our biases anymore?

If you look at this chart and are convinced your "extreme" source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today.

"In the past, national evening news programs, local evening news programs, and the front pages of print newspapers were dominated by fact-reporting stories," says the chart's creator, patent attorney Vanessa Otero. "Now, however, many sources people consider to be 'news sources' are actually dominated by analysis and opinion pieces."

She released the first version of the chart back in 2016, and she's updated it several times since. Over the past year, it's gone viral, with thousands of educators at both the high school and college levels using the compelling visual. She says she's "shocked" by all the attention it's received and still gets requests every day.

Otero also talked about why such bias is so troubling.

"I think the extremes are very toxic and damaging to the country," she explained to MarketWatch. "These extreme sources play on people's worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people's confirmation biases."

And with that, let the backlash over the latest version begin.

Obviously, to many conservatives, Fox News, home to the guy Carter Page describes as this generation's "Edward R. Murrow," has no business on the fringe. And the fact that CNN's bordering the neutral zone is sure to rankle Trump fans.

Then there's Infowars, which Otero deems "nonsense damaging to public discourse." Infowars, after the chart first surfaced, responded with one of its own:

Infowars, run by Alex Jones, wrote that the chart is an example of the "dying dinosaur media's extreme liberal bias" and that it unfairly "demonizes" independent media. Here's just one example of how Infowars shows off its independence:

"If you have just a couple sources that you think are in the middle but none exist either to the right or left of them, or up or down from them, you may be on the wrong track," Otero said, adding that MarketWatch will make the next update.

But where?

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How biased is your news source? You probably won't agree with this chart

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are we even aware of our biases anymore? If you look at this chart and are convinced your "extreme" source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today.

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Most reporters and editors are liberal - a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.

This may seem like an unusual admission from someone who once ran NPR, but it is borne of recent experience. Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon's radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents ("cling to guns or religion") and presidential candidates ("basket of deplorables") alike.

I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn't sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn't expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues - how to help them, not how to keep them out - but that is what I got.

At Urbana, I met dozens of people who were dedicating their lives to the mission, spreading the good news of Jesus, of course, but doing so through a life of charity and compassion for others: staffing remote hospitals, building homes for the homeless and, in one case, flying a "powered parachute" over miles of uninhabited jungle in the western Congo to bring a little bit of entertainment, education and relief to some of the remotest villages you could imagine. It was all inspiring - and a little foolhardy, if you ask me about the safety of a powered parachute - but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie "Footloose."

Early this year, I drove west from Houston to Gonzales, Texas, to try my hand at pig hunting. It was my first time with a gun, and the noticeably concerned owner of the ranch at first banished me to a solitary spot on the grounds. Here, he said, the pigs would come to me and I could not pose a danger to anyone else. It was a nice spot indeed but did not make for much of a story, so I wandered off into the woods, hopefully protected by my Day-Glo hunting vest.

I eventually joined up with a family from Georgia. The group included the grandfather, Paps, and the father, CJ, but it was young Isaac, all of 8 years old, who took on the task of tutoring me in the ways of the hunt. He did a fine job, but we encountered few pigs (and killed none) in our morning walkabout. In the afternoon, with the Georgians heading home, I linked up with a group of friends from Houston who belied the demographic stereotyping of the hunt; collectively we were the equivalent of a bad bar joke: a Hispanic ex-soldier, a young black family man, a Serbian immigrant and a Jew from DC.

None of my new hunting partners fit the lazy caricature of the angry NRA member. Rather, they saw guns as both a shared sport and as a necessary means to protect their families during uncertain times. In truth, the only one who was even modestly angry was me, and that only had to do with my terrible ineptness as a hunter. In the end, though, I did bag a pig, or at least my new friends were willing to award me a kill, so that we could all glory together in the fraternity of the hunt.

I also spent time in depressed areas of Kentucky and Ohio with workers who felt that their concerns had long fallen on deaf ears and were looking for every opportunity to protest a government and political and media establishment that had left them behind. I drank late into the night at the Royal Oaks Bar in Youngstown and met workers who had been out of the mills for almost two decades and had suffered the interlocking plagues of unemployment, opioid addiction and declining health. They mourned the passing of the old days, when factory jobs were plentiful, lucrative and honored and lamented the destruction and decay of their communities, their livelihoods and their families. To a man (and sometimes a woman), they looked at media and saw stories that did not reflect the world that they knew or the fears that they had.

Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.

Take, for instance, the issue of legitimate defensive gun use (DGU), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time - 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day, according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families.

At one point during my research, I discovered a video of a would-be robber entering a Houston smoke shop, his purpose conveyed by the pistol that he leveled at the store clerk. But the robber was not the only armed person in the store. The security cameras show Raleigh, the store clerk, walking out from behind the counter, calmly raising his own gun and firing an accurate stream of bullets at the hapless robber. The wounded robber stumbles out, falls over the curb and eventually ends up under arrest.

It is not just defensive gun use that makes the video remarkable - it is Raleigh himself, who evidences such a nonchalance that he never bothers to put down the cigarette that he is smoking. At the end, Raleigh, having protected his store, enthuses, "Castle Doctrine, baby" - citing a law that allows a person to use force to defend a legally occupied place.

It is an amazing story, though far from unique, but you simply won't find many like it in mainstream media (I found it on Reddit).

It's not that media is suppressing stories intentionally. It's that these stories don't reflect their interests and beliefs.

It's why my new friends in Youngstown, Ohio, and Pikeville, Ky., see media as hopelessly disconnected from their lives, and it is how the media has opened the door to charges of bias.

The mainstream media is constantly under attack by the president. They are "frankly disgusting," "tremendously dishonest," "failing," "they make up the stories" and are now threatened with loss of broadcast licenses if they continue to author "fake news." And that is just a random Wednesday's worth of words from Donald Trump.

Some may take pleasure in the discomfort of the media, but it is not a good situation for the country to have the media in disrepute and under constant attack. Virtually every significant leader of this nation, from Jefferson on down, has recognized the critical role of an independent press to the orderly functioning of democracy. We should all be worried that more than 65 percent of voters think there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media and that our major media institutions are seen as creating, not combating, our growing partisan divide.

Some of this loss of reputation stems from effective demagoguery from the right and the left, as well as from our demagogue-in-chief, but the attacks wouldn't be so successful if our media institutions hadn't failed us as well.

None of this justifies the attacks from President Trump, which are terribly inappropriate coming from the head of government. At the same time, the media should acknowledge its own failings in reflecting only their part of America. You can't cover America from the Acela corridor, and the media need to get out and be part of the conversations that take place in churches and community centers and town halls.

I did that, and loved it, though I regret waiting until well after I left NPR to do so. I am skeptical that many will do so, since the current situation in an odd way works for Trump, who gets to rile his base, and for the media, which has grown an audience on the back of Washington dysfunction. In the end, they are both short-term winners. It is the public that is the long-term loser.
Ken Stern is the president of Palisades Media Ventures and the former CEO of National Public Radio. His book "Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right" (Harper) is out Tuesday.

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Former NPR CEO opens up about liberal media bias

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Most reporters and editors are liberal - a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio.

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How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton's for the taking, and the real question wasn't how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it's Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who's drifting out to sea-an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn't get the nation it purportedly covers.

What went so wrong? What's still wrong? To some conservatives, Trump's surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you're not pushing Clinton to victory if you're pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.

Story Continued Below

The answer to the press' myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. "As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans," Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. "The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what's wrong with this country," Bannon said. "It's just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what's going on."

But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there's another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming "bias" and "conspiracy," or counting D's and R's. That's to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn't true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you're a working journalist, odds aren't just that you work in a pro-Clinton county-odds are that you reside in one of the nation's most pro-Clinton counties. And you've got company: If you're a typical reader of Politico, chances are you're a citizen of bubbleville, too.

The "media bubble" trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don't get the "real America" of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it's no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it's more extreme than you might realize. And it's driven by deep industry trends.

The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn't true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme.

Parts of the media have always had their own bubbles. The national magazine industry has been concentrated in New York for generations, and the copy produced reflects an Eastern sensibility. Radio and TV networks based in New York and Los Angeles likewise have shared that dominant sensibility. But they were more than balanced out by the number of newspaper jobs in big cities, midsized cities and smaller towns throughout the country, spreading journalists everywhere.

No longer. The newspaper industry has jettisoned hundreds of thousands of jobs, due to falling advertising revenues. Dailies have shrunk sections, pages and features; some have retreated from daily publication; hundreds have closed. Daily and weekly newspaper publishers employed about 455,000 reporters, clerks, salespeople, designers and the like in 1990, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By January 2017, that workforce had more than halved to 173,900. Those losses were felt in almost every region of the country.

As newspapers have dwindled, internet publishers have added employees at a bracing clip. According to BLS data, a startling boom in "internet publishing and broadcasting" jobs has taken place. Since January 2008, internet publishing has grown from 77,900 jobs to 206,700 in January 2017. In late 2015, during Barack Obama's second term, these two trend lines-jobs in newspapers, and jobs in internet publishing-finally crossed. For the first time, the number of workers in internet publishing exceeded the number of their newspaper brethren. Internet publishers are now adding workers at nearly twice the rate newspaper publishers are losing them.

This isn't just a shift in medium. It's also a shift in sociopolitics, and a radical one. Where newspaper jobs are spread nationwide, internet jobs are not: Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix. The Chicagoland area, a traditional media center, captures 5 percent of the jobs, with a paltry 22 percent going to the rest of the country. And almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton. So when your conservative friends use "media" as a synonym for "coastal" and "liberal," they're not far off the mark.

What caused the majority of national media jobs to concentrate on the coasts? An alignment of the stars? A flocking of like-minded humans? The answer is far more structural, and far more difficult to alter: It was economics that done the deed.

***

The magic of the internet was going to shake up the old certainties of the job market, prevent the coagulation of jobs in the big metro areas, or so the Web utopians promised us in the mid-1990s. The technology would free internet employees to work from wherever they could find a broadband connection. That remains true in theory, with thousands of Web developers, writers and producers working remotely from lesser metropolises.

But economists know something the internet evangelists have ignored: All else being equal, specialized industries like to cluster. Car companies didn't arise in remote regions that needed cars-they arose in Detroit, which already had heavy industry, was near natural resources, boasted a skilled workforce and was home to a network of suppliers that could help car companies thrive. As industries grow, they bud and create spinoffs, the best example being the way Silicon Valley blossomed from just a handful of pioneering electronics firms in the 1960s. Seattle's rise as a tech powerhouse was seeded by Microsoft, which moved to the area in 1979 and helped create the ecosystem that gave rise to companies like Amazon.

As Enrico Moretti, a University of California, Berkeley, economist who has studied the geography of job creation, points out, the tech entrepreneurs who drive internet publishing could locate their companies in low-rent, low-cost-of-living places like Cleveland, but they don't. They need the most talented workers, who tend to move to the clusters, where demand drives wages higher. And it's the clusters that host all the subsidiary industries a tech start-up craves-lawyers specializing in intellectual property and incorporation; hardware and software vendors; angel investors; and so on.

The old newspaper business model almost prevented this kind of clustering. Except for the national broadsheets-the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and increasingly the Washington Post-newspapers must locate, cheek by jowl, next to their customers, the people who consume local news, and whom local advertisers need to reach. TheSioux Falls Argus Leader is stuck in South Dakota just as the owners of hydroelectric plants in the Rockies are stuck where they are. As much as they might want to move their dams to coastal markets where they could charge more for electricity, fate has fixed them geographically. Economists call these "non-tradable goods"-goods that must be consumed in the same community in which they're made. The business of a newspaper can't really be separated from the place where it's published. It is, or was, driven by ads for things that don't travel, like real estate, jobs, home decor and cars. And as that advertising has gotten harder and harder to come by, local newsrooms have become thinner and thinner.

The online media, liberated from printing presses and local ad bases, has been free to form clusters, piggyback-style, on the industries and government that it covers. New York is home to most business coverage because of the size of the business and banking community there. Likewise, national political reporting has concentrated in Washington and grown apace with the federal government. Entertainment and cultural reporting has bunched in New York and Los Angeles, where those businesses are strong.

The result? If you look at the maps on the next page, you don't need to be a Republican campaign strategist to grasp just how far the "media bubble" has drifted from the average American experience. Newspaper jobs are far more evenly scattered across the country, including the deep red parts. But as those vanish, it's internet jobs that are driving whatever growth there is in media-and those fall almost entirely in places that are dense, blue and right in the bubble.

***

As the votes streamed in on election night, evidence that the country had further cleaved into two Americas became palpable. With few exceptions, Clinton ran the table in urban America, while Trump ran it in the ruralities. And as you might suspect, Clinton dominated where internet publishing jobs abound. Nearly 90 percent of all internet publishing employees work in a county where Clinton won, and 75 percent of them work in a county that she won by more than 30 percentage points. When you add in the shrinking number of newspaper jobs, 72 percent of all internet publishing or newspaper employees work in a county that Clinton won. By this measure, of course, Clinton was the national media's candidate.

Resist-if you can-the conservative reflex to absorb this data and conclude that the media deliberately twists the news in favor of Democrats. Instead, take it the way a social scientist would take it: The people who report, edit, produce and publish news can't help being affected-deeply affected-by the environment around them. Former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent got at this when he analyzed the decidedly liberal bent of his newspaper's staff in a 2004 column that rewards rereading today. The "heart, mind, and habits" of the Times, he wrote, cannot be divorced from the ethos of the cosmopolitan city where it is produced. On such subjects as abortion, gay rights, gun control and environmental regulation, the Times' news reporting is a pretty good reflection of its region's dominant predisposition. And yes, a Times-ian ethos flourishes in all of internet publishing's major cities-Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington. The Times thinks of itself as a centrist national newspaper, but it's more accurate to say its politics are perfectly centered on the slices of America that look and think the most like Manhattan.

Something akin to the Times ethos thrives in most major national newsrooms found on the Clinton coasts-CNN, CBS, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Politico and the rest. Their reporters, an admirable lot, can parachute into Appalachia or the rural Midwest on a monthly basis and still not shake their provincial sensibilities: Reporters tote their bubbles with them.

In a sense, the media bubble reflects an established truth about America: The places with money get served better than the places without. People in big media cities aren't just more liberal, they're also richer: Half of all newspaper and internet publishing employees work in counties where the median household income is greater than $61,000-$7,000 more than the national median. Commercial media tend to cluster where most of the GDP is created, and that's the coasts. Perhaps this is what Bannon is hollering about when he denounces the "corporatist, global media," as he did in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference. If current trends continue-and it's safe to predict they will-national media will continue to expand and concentrate on the coasts, while local and regional media contract.

Can media myopia be cured? Unlike other industries, the national media has a directive beyond just staying in business: Many newsrooms really do feel a commitment to reflecting America fairly. Sometimes, correcting for liberal bias can be smart business as well. For instance, by rightly guessing that there was a big national broadcast audience that didn't see their worldviews represented in the mainstream networks, the Fox News Channel came to dominate cable TV ratings. Adopting Fox's anti-mainstream media message to his political needs, Trump ended up running on a Foxesque platform, making a vote for him into a vote against the elite media-his trash talk was always directed at the national press, not the local. Similarly, Breitbart has seen huge success sticking it to liberals, implicitly taking the side of the "real America" against the coastal bubbles. Breitbart now attracts more than 15 million visitors a month, according to comScore, which isn't far behind more established outlets like the Hill's 24 million and Politico's 25 million.

Everyone acknowledges that Trump's election really was a bad miss, and if the media doesn't figure it out, it will miss the next one, too.

But is this really America, either? It's worth mentioning that Fox and Breitbart-and indeed most of the big conservative media players-also happen to be located in the same bubble. Like the "MSM" they rail against, they're a product of New York, Washington and Los Angeles. It's an argument against the bubble, being waged almost entirely by people who work inside it.

Is America trapped? Certainly, the media seems to be. It's hard to imagine an industry willingly accommodating the places with less money, fewer people and less expertise, especially if they sense that niche has already been filled to capacity by Fox. Yet everyone acknowledges that Trump's election really was a bad miss, and if the media doesn't figure it out, it will miss the next one, too.

Journalism tends toward the autobiographical unless reporters and editors make a determined effort to separate themselves from the frame of their own experiences. The best medicine for journalistic myopia isn't reeducation camps or a splurge of diversity hiring, though tiny doses of those two remedies wouldn't hurt. Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them. If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won't change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.

Tucker Doherty is a data reporter for PoliticoPro.

A note on the methodology: These maps are based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data collected through state unemployment insurance programs. They're limited by the way BLS defines media and publishing jobs, which in some cases may count all employees, including press operators and sales staff. For privacy reasons, BLS doesn't give exact numbers for the smallest counties by population, so we generated estimates for those counties using Census data. The BLS data also aren't perfect at sifting out which employees at big internet firms like Facebook count as "publishing" or "media," and which don't. BLS doesn't release employment data by individual company, so it's hard to drill deeper into the data for accuracy. Even so, this data gives the most reliable general view of how employment in media has evolved and shifted.

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The Media Bubble Is Real - And Worse Than You Think

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How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign.