How Media Bias is Presented in Donald Trump’s News Coverage as a Presidential Candidate by The New York Times?

During the 2016 presidential election in the United States, Donald Trump has become the most contentious presidential candidate. Most importantly, as a Republican Presidential Nominee, Donald Trump accused that the mainstream news media are biased against him. After that, Donald Trump keeps conveying the message to the public that the most news media is having media bias and the media system is even “rigged” by his opponent, the Democratic presidential Nominee, Hillary Clinton. The New York Times speaks up for news media, claiming that the media bias does not exist. To examine whether the claim of media bias of news media during the 2016 presidential election exists or not, this research focuses on the dispute between Donald Trump and The New York Times to diagnose the media bias. To diagnose the media bias in Donald Trump’s news coverage, a “media frame” perspective is adopted. That is to say, in this research, a quantitative content analysis of media frames is first adopted to identify the media frames of Donald Trump’s news coverage. For the reason that, in the claim of “media bias” made by Donald Trump, it also implies that Hillary Clinton is part of the reason within. Therefore, the content analysis of “media frame” is not only conducted in 150 news articles of The New York Times but also in another 150 news articles of The New York Times. Consequently, media frames of both candidates are first identified by the quantitative content analysis, and then the components and characteristic of those media frames are as well presented. The comparisons of the media frames of both candidates are utilized to interpret the “media bias”. As the supplementary method in this paper, particular analysis of each single elements of the “media frame” are also conducted to diagnose other specific forms of “media bias”. As a result, the study finds out that in general, The New York Times is having “media bias” in Donald Trump’s news coverage because there are significant slant of negative or unfavorable information (content) in Trump’s news coverage. And this media bias is further asserted when comparison is done with those media frames of Hillary Clinton’s coverage. What is more, the “media bias” exists in Donald Trump’s news coverage mainly appears to be “ideological bias”, and other than that, “decision-making bias”, “content bias” and “statement bias” are also diagnosed during the supplementary analysis process. Nevertheless, “ideological bias” is the most salient form of the media bias in Donald Trump’s coverage by The New York Times.