STUDY: Media Gives Biden Less Negative Coverage Than Any President On Record

One of the most trusted names in research has found that President Joe Biden has received less negative coverage from the legacy media than any president in 30 years.

Among other surprising findings, the Pew Research Center notes that half of all stories about the Biden administration mention former President Donald Trump. 

Pew also finds that conservatives follow political news more closely than liberals — and that Americans as a whole think the media spend too much time covering systemic racism and not enough time talking about the illegal immigrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Pew Research Center has analyzed the media coverage of the first 60 days of every presidency since Bill Clinton. There most recent findings suggest that media coverage of the Biden-Harris administration ranks among the most favorable, and the least critical, it’s ever seen. 

“While the media landscape has changed dramatically since Clinton’s presidential inauguration, the Center has been able to conduct a long-term comparison for each of the recent administrations,” it says.

More than one of every four media stories about Biden has been positive (27%), tying Clinton in 1993 — when there was only the legacy media. Both fell well behind the media’s adulatory coverage of Barack Obama in 2009 (42%). 

The media ran more than five times as many positive stories about Joe Biden’s first days in office than it did about President Trump in 2017.

Donald Trump received just 5% positive stories, as the media often fixated on lurid — and ultimately discredited — details of his dalliances with Russian prostitutes in the Steele dossier. Most of Biden’s coverage has focused on his ideology and agenda, Pew says.

Now, even though he’s out of office, the media can’t stop talking about Donald Trump.

“Trump himself was mentioned in about half the stories about the new Biden administration,” the study states. Pew finds “virtually no difference in the frequency of those mentions [of Trump in Biden stories] across outlets with left-leaning audiences (50% of stories), outlets with right-leaning audiences (47% of stories) and outlets with a mixed audience (47% of stories).” 

One reason may be that the media hope to juice sagging ratings, because Joe Biden is boredom personified.

Overall, Pew says that “news coverage of President Joe Biden’s early days in office was modestly more negative than positive” during his first 100 days, by nine percentage points. 

But Pew reveals that the perception of viewers is that pro-Biden stories outnumber stories critical of Biden four to one.

Its accompanying survey of 12,045 adults finds that “the public’s sense of news coverage of the Biden administration is more positive than the study of the news coverage reveals.”

“46% of U.S. adults say that the early coverage they’ve seen about the Biden administration offered mostly positive assessments, far more than the 14% who say they’ve seen mostly negative ones,” Pew reports.

The study confirms that conservatives are likely more informed about the Biden administration than the president’s liberal/progressive supporters. Pew finds that “Americans who turn only to outlets with left-leaning audiences [are] least likely to be following news about the Biden administration very closely (16%) – and their counterparts on the right almost twice as likely to do so (30%).”

Finally, the Pew study finds that most major news outlets don’t deliver the news Americans want. Viewers say the legacy media focus too much on racial inequality — “the topic that the highest percentage of Americans say is getting too much attention” — and not enough on the economy and illegal immigration, according to the survey. 

Ben Johnson (@TheRightsWriter) is the Media Reporter at The Daily Wire. He previously worked at the Acton Institute, FrontPage Magazine, and LifeSiteNews. He’s the author of three books, including Party of Defeat (2008, with David Horowitz).

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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