Voters Agree With Trump, Say Media Is Biased Toward Clinton

A plurality of Americans share the sentiment that media coverage is biased toward Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a view pushed for decades by Republicans, and most recently by the party’s current nominee, Donald Trump. Days after Trump proclaimed to be running against two opponents – Clinton and the “disgusting and corrupt media” – a survey found almost four in 10 voters (38 percent) believe the media is biased in trying to help elect the Democratic nominee.

It was the mainstream media, the leading television stations and newspapers such as the ones Trump now critiques, who were blamed, in part, for egging on Trump’s candidacy during the Republican primary. In the view of Thomas E. Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard University, “neither of the two basic indicators of news coverage would have predicted Trump’s heavy coverage,” coverage that he used to his advantage to propel his campaign without spending much on television commercials. But if that was the case during the primary, voters do not believe it to be the case anymore.

These days, only 12 percent of voters said the media is biased in trying to elect Trump. A sliver of Trump’s supporters (9 percent) believe the media is biased toward their candidate, while 66 percent of them said the media is trying to elect Clinton president. Just a little more than one in 10 Trump supporters (13 percent) said the media is fair and unbiased, compared with about a quarter of the overall population. The sentiment among Trump’s supporters was almost identical to that of all the Republican voters surveyed. Among Clinton’s supporters, four in 10 Americans said they viewed the media as unbiased, while 16 percent said it was biased toward helping elect Trump and only 19 percent said it was biased toward trying help elect Clinton.