Civics: “About two-thirds of news coverage dealt with Biden’s policy agenda, while about three-quarters of early Trump coverage was framed around leadership skills”
That framing is dramatically different from the coverage of the first few months of the Trump administration four years earlier. Then, 74% of all stories were oriented around his character and leadership, compared with only about one-quarter (26%) framed around his ideology and policy agenda. Another significant difference in their coverage is that while the negative Biden stories modestly outnumbered the positive ones, negative stories about Trump exceeded positive ones by four-to-one.
One new element of this year’s study – in Part 2 of this report – is a survey component that measures Americans’ exposure to and sense of news coverage during this early time period, how that differs by media diet, and how it compares with the analysis of media content in Part 1. For example, while the topic of the economy was covered most heavily by outlets with a left-leaning audience, a large majority of Americans, regardless of their media diet, report hearing a lot about the passage of the economic stimulus bill in the news. At the same time, 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.
