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The horserace was her most positive source of news but you’ll notice that it was negative on balance—in fact, the ratio was 3-1 negative over positive.

Unlike Trump, who was rising in the polls, Clinton was slipping in the polls. That was bound to happen. The earliest polls are sensitive to name recognition and, early on, Sanders, O’Malley, and Webb were political unknowns. Clinton was the only Democratic contender familiar to most respondents. As the campaign heated up, that artificial advantage began to erode. Each drop in the polls triggered negative stories.

Then, when the primaries started, she did well but not well enough to meet pundits’ “expectations.” And that’s a negative story.

Clinton’s emails also dragged down her coverage. The FBI launched its investigation of Clinton’s emails in early 2015, which triggered a slew of bad press. I’ll say more about the emails later in my talk.

Finally, the “substance” of her campaign was negatively reported. Why was that? It might be thought that her detailed policy proposals and her governing experience would be a source of positive press. But that ignores how journalists operate. They don’t focus on what the candidates are saying about their issues and qualifications. They highlight instead the attacks of opponents. And Clinton was being attacked by Democratic opponents and Republicans alike.

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When the campaign shifted to the general election, Clinton was again the object of bad press—nearly 2-1 negative over positive. [SLIDE]

Here’s a breakdown of that coverage. [SLIDE]As you can see, Clinton had one source of positive coverage—the horserace. She led in the polls throughout most of the general election, which generated favorable coverage.

That was her sole source of good news. Stories about her emails and other alleged scandals ran more than 9-1 negative. What’s revealing of this coverage is that journalists never explained to their audience why the emails merited so many headlines. The fact is, journalists were behaving as they always do when reporting on alleged wrongdoing. Such allegations are treated, not as developments to be investigated and explained, but as “controversies” that are aired because they generate conflict and could affect a candidate’s chances of winning.

As you can also see from the chart, Clinton’s policy proposals, governing experience, personal traits, and the like—the “substance” of her campaign—were also sources of bad press. The coverage of these topics ran 4-1 negative.

Now why is that? Why should years of experience in government at the highest levels be a negative? And why would her policy stands get such unfavorable coverage? After all, more than any other candidate, Clinton was the one who provided the fullest explanation of the policies she would pursue if elected.

This next chart provides a hint as to why those aspects of her candidacy were sources of negative news. [SLIDE] As you can see, when a story was about Clinton, the candidate who spoke more often was Trump and not Clinton. Journalists turned more often to Trump than to Clinton when talking about her candidacy.

The effect was to provide Trump a megaphone through which to define Clinton. And he used it to great effect. [SLIDE] On CNN alone, “Lock her up” was aired 1,264 times. “Crooked Hillary” was aired 1,734 times. Together, they were aired nearly 3,000 times. And that’s just CNN.

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Now Trump was having his own problems with the press during the general election. [SLIDE] In fact, his coverage was more negative than Clinton’s. It ran 3-1 negative over positive to her ratio of 2-1 negative.

As this chart shows, Trump was portrayed negatively on every dimension. [SLIDE] Scandal allegations—everything from his treatment of women to his business dealings—ran 9-1 negative over positive. The “substance” of his campaign was 7-1 negative over positive. Seldom did the press report anything positive about his policy positions, his presidential qualifications, or his personal traits.

And, unlike the nominating period, Trump’s horserace coverage was negative on balance. The ratio was nearly 4-1 negative over positive. Trump trailed in the polls throughout nearly the whole of the general election—a predictable source of bad press.

Now, it’s the nature of the horserace that one nominee is going to be leading and the other trailing. That means that one of them is going to get positive coverage.

But, let’s strip out the horserace stories and look only at the candidates’ other coverage. And what you see in this case is that both Trump and Clinton got hammered by the press. [SLIDE] In fact, their non-horserace coverage was identical in its tone—the ratio was 7 negative stories to 1 positive story. I’ll address the significance of the press’s negative tendency in a few minutes.

Now, when Trump’s coverage turned sharply negative, he lashed out at the media. [SLIDE] He had done some of that during the nominating phase, but it became a crescendo in the general election, coupled with his claim that the press was trying to elect Clinton.

The airing of the Access Hollywood video and subsequent claims of Trump’s mistreatment of women marked the peak of Trump’s negative coverage. [SLIDE] As you can see from this chart, his coverage, including the horserace, ran about 10-1 negative over positive in this period.

The chart also shows the trend in Trump’s vote support. As you can see, his voter support was eroding.

At this point the election appeared all but over. But then, nine days before Election Day, FBI director James Comey publicly announced that the FBI was reopening its investigation of Clinton’s emails. Journalists suddenly had a fresh allegation to cover. [SLIDE] As this chart shows, Clinton’s negative coverage shot up while Trump’s negative coverage dropped, such that her press coverage was marginally more negative than his.

Comey’s letter, and the media’s response to it, changed the dynamics of the race, as you can see in this chart. [SLIDE] Within the space of a week, Clinton’s seemingly safe lead shrank to a one point lead—which is about the margin of her popular vote victory on Election Day.

Did Comey’s letter cost Clinton the election? It probably did, but in a close election, there are always a number of factors that could have tipped the election one way or the other. One thing is sure, political scientists have plenty of theories to pursue as to why she lost, and he won.

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Now, I’d like to step back from Trump and Clinton to talk briefly about two broad tendencies in election coverage.

One is the press’s obsession with the horserace. As I noted several times in the talk, the horserace was the focus of media coverage throughout the campaign. That focus came at a cost. It meant that the subjects most relevant to the voters’ choice of a president—where the candidates stand on policy issues and the experiences and skills they would bring to the White House—were downplayed.

The extent to which this was true in 2016 is clear from this chart, which shows the number of minutes that ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted to the nominees’ policy stands on their evening newscasts during the general election. [SLIDE] The average in recent presidential elections has been about 150 minutes, which works out to roughly a minute per night per network. In 2016, the total was only about 40 minutes, which works out to about 20 seconds per night per network. That’s shameful.

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Another press bias is a preference for the negative. Election news is largely a story of what’s wrong with the candidates as opposed to what might be right. This chart is based on the news coverage of all the 2016 candidates—not just Trump and Clinton, but also Cruz, Sanders, Rubio, Carson, O’Malley, and the rest. [SLIDE] As you can see, the press carried roughly four negative stories about the candidates for every positive one. No wonder so many voters at the end of a presidential campaign think they’re choosing between “the lesser of two evils.”

You might think that 2016 was a bad year, that its candidates deserved their negative coverage. But, as this chart shows, the negative coverage in 2016 is part of a long-term trend. [SLIDE] The last time the two major-party nominees received more positive than negative press was back in the 1980s, nine elections ago.

Why the emphasis on the negative? Part of the answer is found in the lesson journalists derived from the deceptive acts of officials during the Vietnam and Watergate periods. Reporters concluded that politicians couldn’t be trusted and that it was their responsibility to highlight the flaws.

But negativity now pervades the whole of public affairs coverage. Immigration is an example. Immigration typically makes news only when something bad happens. [SLIDE] As this chart indicates, news stories about immigration in recent years have been more than 4-1 negative over positive.

The same is true of news coverage of Muslims. [SLIDE] As you can see in this chart, news stories that center on Muslims are typically negative in tone.

I could show you more such charts. They’re easy to find. What’s hard to find is an area of American life that gets positive coverage.

The reason we should be concerned about journalists’ negative bias is that it warps our sense of reality. Studies have found that Americans consistently believe that government performance and national conditions are worse than the objective data indicate. And not just a little worse, but a lot worse.

Negative news is one of the factors in recent decades that have contributed to a sharp rise in the public’s level of misinformation—inaccurate beliefs and perceptions.

Political scientists used to worry about uninformed voters—people who admittedly don’t know much about public affairs.

Misinformation is more worrisome. It’s the condition where people think they know something but have it wrong, and act on their false belief. That’s a source of real mischief.

And now we have another source of misinformation to worry about—“fake news.”

Here’s a chart that shows the traffic on Facebook during the 2016 election. By the end of the campaign, Americans were circulating more content from fake news sites than from mainstream news sites.

The reason we should be concerned about fake news is that people rely on heuristics in making judgments. Partisanship is the most commonly used heuristic in the political realm. Why, for instance, were Democrats more supportive than Republicans of the Serbian bombing in 1999 while Republicans were more supportive than Democrats of the Iraqi troop surge in 2007? The answer is that many of them were using partisanship as a heuristic. The Serbian bombing was ordered by a Democratic president, Clinton, while the Iraqi troop surge was ordered by a Republican president, Bush.

As it turns out, “familiarity” is also a heuristic. [SLIDE] As this chart shows, the more familiar people are with a claim, the more likely they are to think it is accurate, whether it is actually accurate or not.

Therein rests the power of the false claims that now circulate freely on the Internet. The more often people see them, the more they find them familiar. And the more familiar they become, the greater the number of people who will believe them to be true. One could extend that principle to such claims as “Little Marco” and “Lying Ted.”

“Familiarity” is why I think the mainstream media are making a mistake in engaging Trump’s claim that their news is “fake.” The more that people are exposed to that claim, the more likely they are to believe it.

We already have some evidence that the press is losing its fight with Trump. A recent poll asked Americans whether they had more trust in Trump or in the media to tell them the truth. Respondents were split nearly down the middle—they were roughly as likely to say “Trump” as to say the “news media.” [SLIDE] A decade ago, when asked to make the same type of choice, respondents were twice as likely to say they trusted the press.

And yet, the news media are getting a consolation prize—and a pretty big one at that. In the month of January, Trump received the most news coverage of any newsmaker during the four years that mediaQuant has been measuring newsmakers’ coverage. [SLIDE] In fact, excluding Obama, Trump got more coverage in January than the next 1,000 newsmakers combined.