The biggest news outlets have published more negative stories about Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate — including Donald Trump — since January 2015, according to a new analysis of hundreds of thousands of online stories published since last year.
Clinton has not only been hammered by the most negative coverage but the media also wrote the smallest proportion of positive stories about her, reports Crimson Hexagon, a social media software analytics company based out of Boston.
Data from Crimson Hexagon;
A new analysis from Crimson Hexagon shows Hillary Clinton getting the most negative coverage of the presidential candidates. The data is based on hundreds of thousands of online news stories published since January 1, 2015.
Of course, these numbers are just one way of looking at media bias in the presidential campaign. For instance, while the press has hit Clinton more frequently, Crimson Hexagon also found that it's paid much more attention to her than to Bernie Sanders. And, by design, this kind of analysis may overlook other ways the press can hurt a candidate — like Sanders — by downplaying or dismissing his or her chances.Still, Sanders's supporters have widely accused the media of being in the tank for Clinton. And these numbers suggest that perception may not square with reality.
How was this analysis conducted?
To figure out which news outlets to include in its analysis, Crimson Hexagon used software that measures the number of retweets and mentions on Twitter from publications and their most prolific reporters. They figured out which sites had generated the most "conversation" around each of the candidates, and then filtered out aggregators and other internet bots that weren't writing original stories.
Their final list — which includes the Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, the Huffington Post, and CNN — looks like a fairly conventional ranking of the biggest media players1.
Crimson Hexagon then took more than 170,000 posts by these outlets — stories published from January 1, 2015, until close to today — and ran them through their "auto-sentiment" tool. The software scans tens of thousands of stories within minutes for positive or negative language, sorts them into separate buckets, and tallies up the results.
For example, the software would take at a sentence that said "Trump made a stronger argument" and mark it as a "positive sentiment." Once it looks through the entire story, the software then categorizes the article as positive, negative, or neutral.
"We comb the content and see whether it's positive or negative," says Molly Moriarty, content marketing manager at Crimson Hexagon. "As you'll see, a lot of the conversation about the candidates is overtly negative."
Read more:
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11410160/hillary-clinton-media-bernie-sanders
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