when Trump says
FAKE NEWS? BY LINLEY SANDERS, Data Journalist at YouGov
If you were to say most Americans like President
Donald Trump’s Twitter attacks on national media
organizations, that would be fake news.
Most Americans do not approve of the president’s
rhetoric, particularly when his tweets include
the phrase “fake news.” Trump has posted
more than 400 tweets with the words
“fake news” since YouGov began
tracking public sentiment about
his daily Twitter posts in
February 2017.
Those tweets have
primarily earned
a negative
rating
from
Democrats and Independents, according to data drawn from
YouGov’s TweetIndex, a daily tracker of tweets from the
@realDonaldTrump account. Every day, YouGov asks a nationally
representative sample of Americans to rate the president's
tweets on a five-point scale from Great (+2) to Terrible (-2), which
produces an overall score for how the general population feels
about the tweet on a scale from -200 (if everyone thinks it is
terrible) to +200 (if everyone thinks it is great).
Since the YouGov TweetIndex began collecting data, the median
score for Trump’s tweets among the US population as a whole
is -19. Analysis of public sentiment around all of the president’s
tweets invoking the words “fake news” shows an average score of
-37, slightly below the general population’s median score.
Democrats, in particular, express a low opinion of Trump’s “fake
news” tweets. The median Democrat score for Trump tweets
is -111, but the median score for tweets including “fake news”
is -134. That 23-point gap is slightly more significant than the
21-point gap seen among Independents and the 15-point gap
among Republicans.
The president often uses Twitter to lash out against reported
articles showing the behind-the-scenes drama of his
Administration or to praise his media supporters. He
most-frequently mentions Fox News on Twitter:
The TRUMP RALLY Publication 155