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Monday, April 18, 2016

Analysis Shows Clinton Gets Most Negative Press


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.

According to Vox.com, 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.

Vox notes 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.


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 players

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