(CNSNews.com) — President Donald J. Trump, who has endured 90% negative coverage from the network news programs for more than a year, tweeted today that the reporting by the New York Times “is false,” and added that The Times is a “true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”
NYT Publisher A.G. Sulzberger responded in a statement posted online, saying that Trump’s views are “false” and “dangerous.”
In his Feb. 20 tweet, Trump wrote, “The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”
Sulzberger criticized the president’s “continued attacks on a free press,” and further said, “The phrase ‘enemy of the people’ is not just false, it’s dangerous. It has an ugly history of being wielded by dictators and tyrants who sought to control public information. And it is particularly reckless coming from someone whose office gives him broad powers to fight or imprison the nation’s enemies.”
“As I have repeatedly told President Trump face to face, there are mounting signs that this incendiary rhetoric is encouraging threats and violence against journalists at home and abroad,” said Sulzberger.
In analyzing the network news coverage — ABC, CBS, NBC — of President Trump over the last two years, the Media Research Center documented that the reporting has been 90% negative.
“At the midpoint of Donald Trump’s first term, the establishment media’s obvious hostility shows no signs of relenting, but polls show this negative coverage has had no discernible impact on the public’s attitudes toward the President,” said Research Director Rich Noyes in a post at NewsBusters.
“The 90% negative spin we calculated roughly matches what the Pew Research Center, not a conservative group, found in their study of coverage of Trump’s first 60 days in office,” said Noyes. “They found 62% of network stories were negative, vs. 5% positive and 33% neutral. If you remove the neutral stories and look at just the stories with a clear spin, Pew’s bottom line looks like ours: 93% negative spin, vs. just 7% positive.”
“Harvard media scholar Thomas Patterson looked at coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office,” said Noyes. “He found NBC’s coverage was 93% negative, CBS’s 91% negative; ABC was not included. His study also found highly negative coverage from leading newspapers and CNN, while only Fox News offered balanced coverage (52% negative vs. 48% positive).”
He concluded, “The media elite have clearly waded into the political fray to wage war against this president” but “the effect of their criticism now seems to be virtually nil.”
“Trump’s job approval ratings actually rose slightly last year, despite all of the negative coverage,” said Noyes.
Disclosure: NewsBusters is a division of the Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com.
