https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud/
In some ways, this is kind of obvious just by those who followed the campaign trail alone, but it's nice to have actual scientific evidence that shows how skewed the media depiction was in favor of Trump.
They wanted to sell papers, they sold the country instead.
The thing that I'm worried about is that there is no doubt that the election of 2020 will be way worse in this regard. I mean, maybe we'll get a cleaner candidate and Trump will have more scandals to his name by then, but that's not the issue. The issue is that republicans don't play by the rules, while Democrats chain themselves to them. And this time the republicans are the ones in power. Hell, what if Trump gets around to trying to pass that press censorship shit he's talking about?
I feel like we need an Obama tier charisma just to have so much as a shot.
”Donald Trump succeeded in shaping the election agenda. Coverage of Trump overwhelmingly outperformed coverage of Clinton. Clinton's coverage was focused on scandals, while Trump's coverage focused on his core issues."
The more insulated right-wing media ecosystem was susceptible to sustained network propaganda and disinformation, particularly misleading negative claims about Hillary Clinton. Traditional media accountability mechanisms—for example, fact-checking sites, media watchdog groups, and cross-media criticism—appear to have wielded little influence on the insular conservative media sphere. Claims aimed for ”internal" consumption within the right-wing media ecosystem were more extreme, less internally coherent, and appealed more to the ”paranoid style" of American politics than claims intended to affect mainstream media reporting.
The institutional commitment to impartiality of media sources at the core of attention on the left meant that hyperpartisan, unreliable sources on the left did not receive the same amplification that equivalent sites on the right did.
These same standard journalistic practices were successfully manipulated by media and activists on the right to inject anti-Clinton narratives into the mainstream media narrative. A key example is the use of the leaked Democratic National Committee's emails and her campaign chairman John Podesta's emails, released through Wikileaks, and the sustained series of stories written around email-based accusations of influence peddling. Another example is the book and movie release of Clinton Cash together with the sustained campaign that followed, making the Clinton Foundation the major post-convention story. By developing plausible narratives and documentation susceptible to negative coverage, parallel to the more paranoid narrative lines intended for internal consumption within the right-wing media ecosystem, and by ”working the refs," demanding mainstream coverage of anti-Clinton stories, right-wing media played a key role in setting the agenda of mainstream, center-left media. We document these dynamics in the Clinton Foundation case study section of this report.
In some ways, this is kind of obvious just by those who followed the campaign trail alone, but it's nice to have actual scientific evidence that shows how skewed the media depiction was in favor of Trump.
They wanted to sell papers, they sold the country instead.
The thing that I'm worried about is that there is no doubt that the election of 2020 will be way worse in this regard. I mean, maybe we'll get a cleaner candidate and Trump will have more scandals to his name by then, but that's not the issue. The issue is that republicans don't play by the rules, while Democrats chain themselves to them. And this time the republicans are the ones in power. Hell, what if Trump gets around to trying to pass that press censorship shit he's talking about?
I feel like we need an Obama tier charisma just to have so much as a shot.