Trump dominates media coverage, especially in untrusted media outlets
US President Trump is well behind his challenger Biden in the latest polls, but he continues to dominate reporting. Untrustworthy media in particular report positively on Trump, as a recent study by Pressrelations on the credibility of media in the US election campaign shows.
The analysis shows that the reliability of a source is clearly related to the tone of its articles: the more trustworthy an online medium, the more neutral the reporting on presidential candidate Joe Biden and the more negative on President Donald Trump. The lower the credibility of a source, the more negative the tone about Biden and the more positive about Trump.
Media with a high level of credibility also deal with false reports in a much more intensive and complex manner. Less trustworthy media, on the other hand, tend to report one-sidedly and avoid fact-checking Trump's statements. Overall, the US media report much more negatively about Biden than the DACH media. Across countries, reporting on Biden in the media classified as particularly trustworthy is neutral to positive, while reporting on Trump is predominantly negative.
Within a month, Joe Biden's share of exclusives has shrunk from 15% to just 9%. This means that Donald Trump currently has twice as many exclusive TV and online articles and more than twice as much reach as his challenger. The situation is different on his own Twitter channels: with his tweets, presidential candidate Biden achieves an average of 36% more interactions than the incumbent president - and with less than an eighth of the followers of his rival Trump.
The qualitative analysis is based on over 25,000 manually coded US, German, Austrian and Swiss online articles and TV reports on the US election as well as over 3,000 tweets published by the presidential candidates. The study is available for download at Pressrelations.news/selection ready. A further and final report on the entire survey period from August 1 to November 3, 2020 will be published after the election.
In this study, the NewsGuard score integrated into the NewsRadar customer analysis portal is used to assess the trustworthiness of media. The relevant sources are checked for credibility and transparency by trained journalists according to a grid of criteria and rated using a points system from 0 to 100. Warnings based on the traffic light principle provide analysts and end customers with quick orientation when classifying media in an increasingly complex media world.
