A new study released this week found that media outlets with a right-leaning audience are more likely to provide neutral stories of President Donald Trump and his administration than outlets with a mixed or left-leaning audience.
The Pew Research Center conducted the study on media coverage of the Trump presidency and showed that outlets with a right-leaning audience are unsurprisingly more likely to provide positive coverage of the Republican president. But only 31 percent of their stories provided a positive assessment of Trump, compared to only five percent of stories from outlets with a left-leaning audience and six percent from outlets with a mixed audience.
The majority of stories on Trump from right-leaning outlets—55 percent—were neutral. Only 47 percent of stories from middle-of-the-road outlets and 39 percent of stories from liberal outlets provided a neutral assessment.
Pew defined outlets by their audiences' political views rather than any stated editorial stance. So while Fox News and the New York Times both claim to be balanced, Fox was sorted into the "right-leaning" category along with sites like Breitbart and IJ Review and the Times was sorted into the "left-leaning" category with Slate and Vox.
Overall, Pew found that a whopping 62 percent of stories about Trump in his first 60 days were negative and only five percent were positive. By comparison, only 20 percent of stories about President Barack Obama's first 60 days were negative and 42 percent were positive.