OPINION

BRUMMETT ONLINE: How the news works

Donald Trump defenders gleefully cite a study from Harvard — Harvard, the supposed liberal bastion that infested us with such brainwashed liberals as Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz.

The study found that coverage of Trump in his first 100 days in 10 major mainstream news outlets was far more negative than that for any other president in recent history. Trumpians assert clear evidence, therefore, of liberal media bias, even from a liberal source.

That discounts the factor that Trump was a far worse and much more blundering president than any in recent history.

Trumpians need to consider that negative media coverage might have something to do with negative performance by the one covered.

Harvard didn’t so much find media bias as it demonstrated an ability to do math. Here’s how it works: Negative, negative, negative, positive, negative, negative, positive, negative, negative, negative — that’s 10 Trump presidential performances, eight of which were bad and two of which were good, which comes to 80 percent negative in terms of coverage.

It’s hard to report positively that Trump said his inaugural crowds were bigger than Barack Obama’s when they were substantially smaller; that Trump issued a hasty, sloppy and illegal executive order banning entry to the country of an entire religion that set the international travel community into chaos; that Trump said the Obama administration had wiretapped his phone when it hadn’t; that Trump pushed a promise-keeping bill to repeal and replace Obamacare that got pulled down; that no wall between us and Mexico has been built even in part though one was promised; that no tax reform or infrastructure bill has been introduced though both were promised; and that an investigation proceeds apace into whether the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia.

The survey found coverage to be positive on average for Trump in one case, that being the bombing of the Syrian airstrip in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own country’s children.

Do you see how that works? When the president does something successfully, the coverage is positive. When he does something failed, it’s negative. Trump’s problem thus is Trump, not the chroniclers of his prevailing buffoonery.

On average, the coverage of Trump over those 100 days in the 10 outlets — seven major American ones and three major European ones, including the New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks — was found by the study to be the aforementioned 80 percent negative.

That probably suggests a soft-pedaling on Trump’s errors, actually, considering that a rough estimate is that 95 percent of this presidency over those hundred days qualified as one rolling snafu.

Even Fox News, which exists to promote Trump (and harass women), could manage to be only 48 percent positive, thus 52 percent negative. That was owing to the inconvenience of having to report what happened before turning the latest Trump blunder over to apologetic commentary.

When Fox News finds it necessary to be 52 percent negative in its coverage, then the problem for a Republican must be the Republican.

If the argument is that the media is biased against Trump because of that 80 percent average, then it would follow that Fox News is biased against Trump, too, only by marginally less frequency.

Trump’s 80 percent negative coverage exceeds second-place Bill Clinton, whose 100-day coverage in the same survey was 60 percent negative. You remember all that, surely.

There was the gays-in-the-military controversy. There were the two failed nominations for attorney general. There was strong congressional resistance to Clinton’s five-year budget plan. There was an airport haircut. There was an undisciplined White House reflecting the undisciplined nature of the man in the Oval Office.

That wasn’t media bias. It was Clinton.

Mainly what Harvard found was that Clinton messed up a lot and Trump messed up even more.

It is true that any blind survey of the political leanings of persons working for those surveyed mainstream media outlets would find them leftward.

It is true that those leanings influence the kinds of stories that are pursued and the prominence those stories receive.

It is true that an informed person wanting to leak something unfavorable about Trump will find a more obliging reception at the New York Times than at Fox — and vice versa.

None of that changes the fact that, even in that context, the mainstream media coverage was overwhelmingly positive when Trump did the rare thing that seemed measured and was executed successfully, meaning the Syrian bombing.

A reporter can be gleeful he’s got the goods on Trump and still have the goods on Trump.

I’ll make this challenge: If Trump will pass real health-care reform, pass an infrastructure program, pass tax reform, get a Mexican wall started, and stop saying things that sound like obstruction of justice, then the major mainstream media’s coverage will be less negative.

That’s how news coverage works. It’s going to be driven nearly every time by … you know, what happens.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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