politics. at the same time, we have the polarization, you had that wonderful tape out in montana about people s reaction to the body slam. you can see that we are polarized. a lot of that is working its way into political discourse. so it is more negative but the press is concentrating on what s going wrong. professor, we love to claim that we yes or arn for more substance. there s a pie chart that says coverage was 42% in the 2016 race about the horse race nature of this. only 10% of coverage was on policy. do we really want policy coverage or do we just say that? well, i think to a degree we do say that. you do surveys, people say they would like to hear more about the issues, and then they do the issue coverage and we don t pay much attention to it. to me, striking thing about coverage in 2016 was how much
a new study from researchers at harvard university looked at ten major news outlets, found the overwhelming majority of coverage of the new administration s first 100 days was hostile. yes. thank god for social science. joining me, author of the study, thomas patterson, professor of government and the press at shorenstein center at the harvard s kennedy school. i want to talk about the presidential race and the first 100 days. coverage of both major candidates was incredibly negative. 62% of the time for hillary negative, 56% of the time for trump was negative. you point out there was not a single week when it reached into positive territory. explain. well, i think the bias of the press is a negative bias. i think the reason that tucker carlson didn t like our first study is that it showed that hillary clinton had more negative coverage than donald trump during the election but
for donald trump in those two issues in the first 100 days. so to some degree, the press is reflecting what s going on out there, but again there s a selectivity to focus primarily on what s going wrong, rather than what might be going right. finally we put on the screen a graph that shows the seven outlets, overall the coverage they had for president trump and people can see, cnn is at the top of the list, nbc and cbs and the times. but fox news, 52, 48 by a narrow margin. but this needs to be underscored. i ll say it this way. even coverage from fox was more negative than positive of president trump. no, that s true. and fox did find some silver linings in the first 100 days. one reason it came close to being positive, they paid a lot more attention to kind of the economic trends since trump took over the oval office. the other thing they did, they underplayed the russian
in hillary clinton s case, her e-mails got about four times the coverage of what she was saying on all of the issues of the campaign, domestic and international. and she said a lot about the issues. so it wasn t as if she wasn t talking about them, but the press was concerned primarily about her e-mails. shifting to president trump s first 100 days, we ll put another graph on the screen that shows that 80% of coverage has been negative. he never had a honeymoon. the viewers can see that puts him at odds with his predecessors. is that in and of itself indicative of bias, that 80% of his coverage was negative? well, again if you look at the chart, obama is the one exception, the one president who did get a honeymoon from the press in the first 100 days. the other three on the chart did not. but it s not cater of bias. but it s not an indicator of bias. it is an indicator of negative bias.
you can see that we are polarized. a lot of that is working its way into political discourse. so it is more negative but the press is concentrating on what s going wrong. professor, we love to claim that we yearn for more substance. there s a pie chart that says coverage was 42% in the 2016 race about the horse race nature of this. only 10% of coverage was on policy. do we really want policy coverage or do we just say that? well, i think to a degree we do say that. you do surveys, people say they would like to hear more about the issues, and then they do the issue coverage and we don t pay much attention to it. to me, striking thing about coverage in 2016 was how much these policy and leadership controversies, how big they were. they got twice as much coverage as substantive policy issues.