Harvard Study: Media Coverage of Trump 80 Percent Negative

President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office "set a new standard for negativity" for press coverage of a president, a Harvard study found.

The Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy study examined coverage by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, broadcast outlets CNN, CBS, Fox News and NBC, and European news outlets the Financial Times, BBC and ARD in Germany.

"Trump's coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity," study author Thomas Patterson wrote. "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."

According to the study:

Trump was 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.
Trump's most favorable U.S. coverage has come from Fox, though 52 percent of the coverage was still rated as negative. CNN and NBC tied for least favorable, with 93 percent of stories negative. In Europe, ARD's coverage was 98 percent negative.

According to the study, the high point for Trump came after he ordered retaliatory missile attacks against Syria when the Assad regime gassed its own citizens. The low points were when a court struck down an executive order restricting immigration from several predominately Muslim countries, and when a Republican effort to overturn Obamacare failed.

Broken down by topic, the subject on which Trump got the most negative coverage was immigration, at 98 percent, while economic stories were just 54 percent negative.

"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," Patterson wrote.

"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."