Much like her boss, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt likes to play the hits. Bashing mainstream media networks like CNN for relentlessly negative coverage of the Trump administration is a tried-and-true strategy on the right—and conservatives often raise some fair points about media double standards.
But some of this is just griping. While it's true that the mainstream media covers President Donald Trump very negatively, the media also covers everything with a powerful negativity bias. This first became evident to me while watching local news, where stories of killings, assaults, and abductions always generated attention that was disproportionate to the likelihood of any of these things occurring. In a very literal sense, that's because the news consists of things that happen, rather than things that don't happen. "No One Died" is not a news headline; "Someone Died" is. This remains true even if "No One Died" is the more common state of affairs. Most non-journalists have probably heard about this phenomenon, which is often colloquially known as if it bleeds, it leads.
