Campaign Reporters Hate Everyone

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Who gets the most positive campaign coverage? Vox asked Crimson Hexagon, a social media software analytics company, to run the numbers, and the answer is John Kasich. Who gets the most negative coverage? Hillary Clinton.

No surprise there, I suppose. As usual, though, I’d caution against making very much out of this. For starters, there’s not a lot of difference between the candidates. And sometimes there’s just bad news to report. I think that Hillary has been the target of some poor reporting on her email problems, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was bound to get a lot of negative coverage no matter what. That’s life.

The chart on the right shows net coverage (positive minus negative) for all five of the remaining candidates, and the most telling statistic is that campaign coverage is just overwhelmingly negative, full stop. On average, each of the candidates received about 5 percent positive coverage and 35 percent negative coverage. It’s no wonder that everyone thinks they’re treated uniquely badly by the press. They obsess over the fact that they (really and truly) get overwhelmingly bad coverage, without realizing that everyone else does too. Apparently campaign reporters just hate the idea of writing anything positive about anybody.

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PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

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