Media Coverage of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump 2023-2024
Right-Leaning Websites refer to Donald Trump as Phenomenal while Left-Leaning Websites say that Kamala Harris is an Inspiration
Americans are exposed to vastly different partisan news ecosystems and these divergent media ecosystems have helped shape Americans’ increasingly polarizing opinions on politics. While the polls remain deadlocked and many expert forecasting models give both candidates a nearly equal likelihood of winning the presidency, as the US Presidential Election enters its final week, I thought it would be interesting to analyze how the news covered the two major party candidates, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
For this post, I am analyzing a dataset of news articles collected by my research lab at Stanford University published by 1,520 partisan (either left-leaning or right-leaning) US-based news websites between January 1, 2023, and October 11, 2024. This collection of news websites includes prominent right-leaning websites such as Fox News and Breitbart as well as left-leaning websites like the Washington Post and Salon.
This dataset had 734K news articles that mentioned Donald Trump and 113K news articles that mentioned Kamala Harris. Already, this might explain why some parts of the American public feel like they don’t know Kamala Harris very well — despite being the Vice President, she received nearly 6.5 times less coverage than Donald Trump (at least in this dataset).
Coverage of Kamala Harris
While Vice President Kamala Harris only recently joined the presidential race on July 21 at the top of the Democratic Ticket, since then, the media has had ample time to describe and define her as a politician.
Directly comparing the word usage ratio of how right-leaning and left-leaning news media websites described her, left-leaning media have labeled her as “inspiring”, “vibrant”, and “original.” Yahoo News even published an article about“How Kamala Harris's historic firsts are inspiring Americans across the country”, with the article stating:
Testimonies of moments in Harris’s personal life as a daughter of immigrants, a former McDonald’s employee, a stepmother in a blended family and a Black woman who graduated from a historically Black university have impacted people across the country who have found her rise from humble beginnings an inspiration for a world “ready for change.”
Largely, in contrast, right-leaning websites have described Kamala Harris as a “leftist” and a “failure”, labeling her as “secretive” and “stupid.” For example, a recent Fox News article about Vice President Harris’ support for relief for those affected by war in Lebanon quoted the actor James Wood, writing:
“Even Kamala Harris, the gold standard of stupid, isn’t stupid enough to post this.”
Looking at how each news media ecosystem has changed how they described the Democratic nominee in the last three months, we observe that right-leaning websites have begun to refer more often to Harris as “comfortable”, “mental”, and “young”. These include news articles by outlets such as Breitbart and The Washington Times that have reported on Donald Trump’s criticism of Kamala Harris’ mental fitness and his calls her to take cognitive tests.
In contrast, liberal-leaning have increased their descriptions of Kamala Harris as competent and non-radical, calling her “safe”, “firm”, and “important.” Reporting from the Washington Post states that Kamala Harris even ran her Vice Presidential office like a prosecutor, with members of her staff calling her a “firm but fair” boss.
Coverage of Donald Trump
In contrast to Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump has been a fixture of American life for decades with many Americans knowing of him as far back as the 1980s. Indeed, many researchers and journalists have commented on the overexposure that the public has had to Donald Trump, with many individual scandals or news stories being unable to define or affect him. Over this period of time, coverage in the left-leaning and right-leaning news ecosystems has become well-defined.
Directly comparing left-leaning and right-leaning websites, we observe left-leaning websites referring to Donald Trump as “thick” and full of “bravado”, and referring to his campaign as somewhat “surreal.”
In contrast, right-leaning websites have more often described Donald Trump as “phenomenal”, “bold”, and in touch with the “average” man. Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign, the Donald Trump campaign has made pains to ensure that the former President is perceived as caring about the “average” American and this is largely reflected in right-leaning news coverage. In the last few weeks of the campaign, Donald Trump has even posed for photo ops where he worked at McDonald’s, drove a garbage truck, and wore construction site vests.
Looking at how coverage of Trump has changed in the last months of the campaign, right-leaning media has expounded on Trump as the “expected winner” of the presidential race and written extensively about how he was an anti-war president during his first term. The large increase in describing Trump as “peaceful” largely also reflects attempts by the Trump campaign to reframe the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “peaceful” and “patriotic.”
In contrast, over the last few months, left-leaning outlets have continued to emphasize the legal difficulties of former President Trump as well as the various legal challenges his campaign is posed to make, following the 2024 election.
In the last few months, we further see that increasingly news articles from left-leaning news websites have referred to Trump as “weak.” Indeed, the Lincoln Project, a conservative political action committee founded by Republicans who oppose Donald Trump, published an ad called “One Old Man” that called Trump “weak, impotent, forgetful, mentally declining fast.” This language was even utilized by Kamala Harris during an interview with 60 Minutes. When asked about Donald Trump's decision to not release his medical records, Kamal Harris replied :
One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
Polarizing Media Coverage
As we approach the final days of this presidential election, it is clear that the media landscape reflects — and arguably reinforces — the deep partisan divides in American politics. The starkly different portrayals of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump across left- and right-leaning outlets underscore the extent to which news ecosystems serve not just as sources of information but as powerful shapers of perception.
Whether it is Donald Trump being accused of saying that there would be a “bloodbath” if he loses (he was referring to the car industry being decimated) or right-wing media and Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’ ethnicity (I am Black and South Asian myself), it is exceedingly important to question the motivations and basis of different media outlets. Indeed, as seen throughout this post, the left-leaning and right-leaning media have covered Donald Trump and Kamala in partisan and vastly different manners.
According to Gallup, only 32% of Americans report trusting the media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to publish fair and accurate news stories. As trust in the media declines and partisan divides deepen, voters face the challenge of not only choosing between candidates but also navigating media bubbles that often echo their own views. On Election Day, the outcomes may reveal more than just political leanings — they might also reflect the distinct media realities each voter experiences.
Methodology
Throughout the last four years of my PhD, my research lab at Stanford has been collecting and analyzing news articles from across the globe to study the spread of different news narratives and to measure and detect propaganda and misinformation. If you are interested, in the exact websites that I am using for this post, you can find the list on my GitHub. Each of these websites has been categorized as being right-leaning or left-leaning by the website Media-Bias/Fact-Check.
To identify the words used to describe each candidate, I calculated the log odds ratio of words between the right-leaning and left-leaning websites’ use of descriptive/opinionated words in sentences mentioning Kamala Harris and Donald Trump using a sentiment analysis model called TextBlob to identify these words. By limiting the extracted words to those that have a negative or positive sentiment (i.e., the word “horrible” has a negative sentiment while the word “amazing” has a positive sentiment), I determined which descriptive words were utilized in each ecosystem.