Each day in this election cycle, upon checking the news I would see almost exclusively negative coverage of Donald J.Trump, ridiculing the former television producer and his legions of supporters. Even Fox news and other Republican news outlets were split about Trump or covered him in a similar fashion.Regardless of whether this was deserved or not,many Americans felt that a media bias existed. In fact, an AP-GFK poll found that over 50 percent of the 1,546 adults they polled felt their is a media bias against Trump. However, On November 8th,as I watched the election,I was shocked-Trump was winning. Why the media disconnect?How come the Polls are wrong? Is the media biased towards Clinton? And if the media is biased towards Clinton-why did Trump win? How influential is the media on elections in general?
Let me begin by drawing attention to some images that will help us understand media bias in this election from analysts over at thedataface.
Interestingly, over the course of a year there were far more articles talking about Trump than Clinton.And what's even more strange is that left-wing outlets had far more coverage of Trump than right wing outlets. However, this does not tell us whether this was good or bad coverage.The analysts used a python text processing library called Textblob for further analysis which scored the articles on a scale of negative one to one depending on the proportion of words in the article that were either negative or positive.The graph at the bottom of the article is what they found.
Four out of the eight outlets were more positive for one candidate then the other.However,while three outlets were fully supportive of Hillary only Fox news was found to be fully supportive of Trump.The analysts wrote that “That Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Weekly Standard are not statistically more favorable to Trump than Hillary has to be cause for concern among his supporters.”There is also another graph from the same analysts which illustrates how, towards the end of the period, both conservative and liberal news outlets started to align their views on Trump-and it wasn’t positive coverage
So if the media is so influential,or at least reflective of what people think,why did Trump win? Douglas Rivers,a professor of political science at Stanford, wrote an article recently explaining that the media and it's polls weren’t so far off.He explains that although there are anomalies in the polls,Clinton did win the popular vote and the polls weren’t off by that much.He notes that the(four million) votes that have not been counted and Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote is expected to grow.Still even if the polls make sense,the question remains-the media predicted Trump would lose by a landslide. In order to answer this question I would like to introduce a popular hypothesis-the third person effect.The third person effect essentially states that people think that the media does not influence them as much as it does other people.Studies have shown that due to this, people will actively try to act against the influence of the media.Similar studies have also indicated this could even influence Israeli elections.I would like to propose that perhaps this is what happened in this year's election.The media, for over a year of its coverage,was clearly more supportive of Hillary Clinton.Even conservative news outlets began a more negative outlook of Trump towards the end of the election. Perhaps this backfired. Maybe even the people that weren’t too keen on Donald Trump,or people who only liked certain aspects of him,the fear and unwillingness of being influenced by the media,the third person effect, kicked in-and they voted for him
(Note:Politico appears so supportive of Trump is because, they were originally supportive of Sanders and anti-Clinton.)