BOB GARFIELD:  As we heard, Republicans also lament their inability to make headway on legislative goals, but one thing is certain, it is not Donald Trump's fault, at least not if you ask Donald Trump. During his campaign, he blamed the nation's problems and his own offenses and blunders on perpetrators ranging from “crooked Hillary” to Mexicans, to Muslims, to the Democratic Party, to the Republican Party, to Obama, to Wall Street and, I believe, Lex Luther. Once elected, though, he's distilled his animus toward one ultra-arch nemesis.

 [CLIPS]:

 [AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  A few days ago, I called the fake news the “enemy of the people,” and they are. They are the enemy of the people.

 [CHEERS/APPLAUSE]

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  The press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.

PRESIDENT TRUMP:  Look at the way I've been treated lately, especially by the media. No politician in history - and I say this with great surety - has been treated worse or more unfairly.

 [END CLIP]

BOB GARFIELD:  It’s likely no other president has so blamed the messenger for his own travails, but if we’re just talking about the sheer negativity of Trump’s coverage, well, that he got exactly right.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  The coverage of the first 100 days broke 80% negative to 20% positive.

BOB GARFIELD:  Thomas E. Patterson is the Bradley Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard's Shorenstein Center and author of a new report that examined coverage of the president's first few months.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Before Trump, the president who, in the  first 100 days, had the worst coverage was Bill Clinton. His was  60% negative to 40% positive. So Trump is pretty much in an atmosphere that hasn’t been touched before.

BOB GARFIELD:  Also unique, the sheer amount of coverage.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Compared to what's normal for a president,  he got three times as much coverage. So the press can't seem to get enough of Donald Trump, even though Donald Trump, for his part, certainly goes after the press at every opportunity.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, what's being measured here is tone and, you know, there’s no blood test for tone. So how do you do it? What's the methodology?

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  What we’re talking about is from the perspective of the person who’s the subject of the news story. Would that person see this news story as positive or negative? So it can be simply a development that reflects unfavorably on the individual. For example, when the district court judge in Seattle struck down that first immigration order, that would be considered an unfavorable news report, from Trump’s perspective.

BOB GARFIELD:  And the negativity is across the board. Every single thing but the cruise missile attack on Syria has been a drubbing.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Well, we took a look at major topics,  immigration, war on terrorism, and the like. There was not a single one of those major categories where his coverage, on balance, was more positive than negative,

BOB GARFIELD:  You noted something odd about the negative coverage, and that is that it wasn't a partisan pile-on.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Well, that’s what’s interesting. You know, when a president gets coverage, usually it’s other people talking, but in Trump's case about two-thirds of the time the voice you hear is that of Donald Trump. That was true also during the campaign, by the way. You looked at Hillary Clinton's coverage, on the other hand, what was the dominant voice in her coverage? Well, it wasn't Hillary Clinton. In fact, it was Donald Trump. He had more soundbites about Hillary Clinton than she did about herself, and he also had more soundbites about himself. And that's carried over into these presidential weeks.

BOB GARFIELD:  And the other voices?

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Someone in the administration, Sean Spicer, obviously, being one of those voices, and then the congressional Republicans. Democrats accounted for only about 6% of Trump’s coverage and protesters 3%. So they’ve been a quite, quite small voice.

BOB GARFIELD:  Increasingly, White Houses have gotten more and more adept at going around the White House press corps, but even when Trump does that, on Twitter, for the most part, it still blows up in his face.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Well, I think we have a press that's obsessed almost with Donald Trump and has been since he announced his candidacy. You know, they’re so focused, that almost anything that he says or does, including his tweets, basically feed into the news coverage. And if I had a criticism of the coverage of the first 100 days, it’s that it's been so Trump focused, and there’s been very little carry-through on – for example, on his executive orders. His executive orders on immigration received quite a bit of press attention, but the others accounted for only about one half of 1% of his news coverage. And it’s here where he’s had some policy impact. The press, I think, is making a mistake that have made during the election, focusing too much on the candidates and not paying a lot of attention to what was going on out in the country.

I do think the success or lack of success of this presidency is going to rest largely on how the American public responds to it. It’s a big story and it’s been a largely uncovered story.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, Trump supporters and I think the GOP, in general, and this goes back decades, have been quick to assert a liberal bias, a Democratic Party bias. And your conclusions did observe bias, but it wasn't partisan. You wrote about the journalistic reflex or instinct to report on bad weather, not good weather.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  If you look at all presidential nominees since Reagan and their coverage during the general election, Democratic and Republican, all but Barack Obama in 2008 received, on balance, negative coverage. So, you know, that's the press in its, in its usual mode. They’re on the attack. They're looking for the critical story, things that go bad, rather than things that go good. And it’s not just about  presidents, it’s also about Congress. That erodes public trust. You know, they certainly let us down if they don't blow the whistle when things go wrong. On the other hand, to tell us when things are going right, I think that's an important part of their responsibility, as well.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, I would assert that Trump’s complaints that the press is unfair is, in some ways, a self-fulfilling prophecy. He has, through his own words, actions, inactions and lies, invited the kind of coverage that he is complaining about. So what's the press to do?

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  You know, I do think if this had been a Democratic administration and had gotten off to the start that it has, you'd see something very close to what we found, very heavily negative coverage. Now, the press has a problem whether it's unbiased or not, and that's the way we perceive bias in news coverage. When you go back to the eight years of the Clinton administration, Democrats were somewhat more likely than Republicans to think that the media were biased. So now we have a Republican in the White House and, not surprisingly, it’s Republicans overwhelmingly who think the press has been unfair.

BOB GARFIELD:  But isn't the answer to that, oh well, because anything you do to try to address those perceptions of bias takes you down that slippery slope of false balance and pulling punches and bending over backwards? I would say let the chips fall where they may.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  No, I agree with that but, again, I do think the press is too critical, underreporting the positive developments, over-reporting the negative. What's interesting is where there have been studies and Americans are asked, you know, what’s the trend in crime, what’s the trend in employment, what’s the trend in inflation, their opinions are that it’s worse than it actually is. You know, when we looked at coverage of Muslims over the last decade, that's run about 80% negative. And then you wonder why the American public has a negative perception, or many do, of Muslims.

Now, when Trump announced for the presidency, he really tapped into a lot of resentment, and those negative perceptions that so many people have of these groups made that a pretty easy sell in some quarters. I’m not trying to say that the press has full responsibility for that, but I do think the balance is somewhat out of whack.

BOB GARFIELD:  Those on the right or particularly in Trump’s space will look at this report and say, aha, it’s the smoking gun, it is overwhelmingly negative ipso facto there is bias against the president, and so forth.

Now, there's another interpretation, that this president, at least through the first 100 days, was a historic menace, an  incompetent. If that's the case, how do you even go about discerning what is overly negative and what is just reporting what you’re seeing?

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  I think it’s a troubling question, actually. There was a time when the American public had a somewhat common base of facts, and what's happened with this media system we have and the fact that a lot of us collect information around our biases, facts can be used to advance your partisan agenda. I do think one thing the press needs to be careful about is Trump has kind of gone to war with the press. I think there could be a tendency for journalists to think that they’re at war with the president. And to the degree that they see themselves as the opposition, I think they’re headed for trouble.

BOB GARFIELD:  One final thing. If this report is, in fact, a kind of Rorschach ink blot that Trump haters will see one way and Trump supporters will see the opposite, would your last number of weeks been better off spent fishing or –

 [PATTERSON LAUGHS]

- you know, scrapbooking or something that you’ll actually be able to see [LAUGHS] some tangible results?

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  No, Bob. You know, we did studies during the election and we found that Hillary Clinton had more negative coverage than Donald Trump. Now, we got the exact opposite response to those studies. Conservatives dissed them, saying, that can’t be true, that they were trying to get her elected. Well, if they were trying to give her elected, they have a funny way of going about it.

But I think, as a scholar, you try to be unbiased and you put it out there and, at that point, boy, you lose control of it pretty fast. But maybe I'll find some time this summer to do some fishing.

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] Tom, many thanks.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON:  Bob, you’re welcome.

BOB GARFIELD:  Thomas E. Patterson is the Bradley Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Coming up, the right does not have a monopoly on illiberality.

BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media.