Topic: Accuracy in Media
Carrie Sheffield writes in a Feb. 14 Accuracy in Media post:
The mainstream media hit President Trump for urging Democrats in Congress not to engage in partisan investigations against his administration, yet their coverage ignores findings from a Gallup poll released yesterday and taken in the wake of the government shutdown showed that the president’s job approval is more than 20 percent higher than the public’s approval of Congress.
But puffing up Trump's popularity rating by comparing it to that of Congress is irrelevant. Gallup's own polling shows that Congress rates perpetually low -- generally fluctuating between 10 and 20 percent since 2012. Further, President Obama's second-term approval average, covering the first few years of that congressional polling, was 46.7 percent -- meaning that he too scored "more than 20 percent higher than the public’s approval of Congress."
We suspect AIM would never have made such a claim about Obama's popularity.
Sheffield went even further in the poll-spinning route, claiming that Trump's numbers were up -- in this case, at 44 percent in the first poll after the shutdown ended -- because "Gallup found that Americans credited the president with ending the shutdown" while also claiming that only "the mainstream media blamed Trump for the shutdown." But Sheffield ignored another Gallup poll finding that 50 percent of Americans believed that Democratic leaders in Congress acted more responsibly during the shutdown, while ly 39 percent believed Trump did.
Sheffield also ignores that Trump remains generally unpopular, having never received more than 50 percent approval in any Gallup poll -- the only president with that distinction.
