"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."
When you consider this line especially, with everything else, it seems more consistent with "Trump is unusually unpopular and criticized" than "the media is even more liberal now."
Maybe you should think about your own biases here, before continuing to equate "negative towards Trump" with "liberal/left"?
If I wanted to write a post criticizing Trump I'd have an incredibly easy time doing it from several right-wing perspectives: religious/moral, small government/individual freedom, anti-corruption/pro-transparency, take your pick. It's all fish in a barrel.
But I don't think those are it. When Jimmy Carter says the media is applying a different standard to Trump, it lends credibility to the idea that they just might be.
Not really. Carter is a qualified expert in some things, but analyzing media bias is emphatically not one of them. Now, as a statement that seems at odds with Carter's assumed partisan bias, him saying it may be more credible as a genuine statement of belief than of a source said the same thing with either no obvious partisan bias or consistent with obvious partisan bias, but that's not the same as lending credibility to the claim itself.
I honestly believe the difference now is Trump itself. He's uniquely unqualified to be president on every intellectual or moral metric I would consider relevant. Therefore, an objective press would be expected to be far more negative than positive.
The other problem (or clever strategy on the right) is to paint mainstream outlets like NY Times or Washington Post as the 'other side', while basically ignoring truly left-leaning media, like Huffington Post or Vox. In doing so, they portray a spectrum where Fox and Breitbart lean to one side, and NY Times / WaPo lean to the other, with the unbiased position somewhere in the center - when in reality, the average of those publications is pretty far on the conservative side of the spectrum. (Even more so for those who actually believe Fox is 'balanced' and other mainstream outlets are in fact far left.)
I don't think it's necessarily impossible to do good journalism while being biased; I think Vox does a fair amount of good reporting for instance. It is necessary though to clearly distinguish between fact and opinion.
“News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days”[0]
Summary:
“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).”
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https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...