The most recent Off Message podcast from POLITICO is interesting, they have David Brock on and they talk about many different things from what he thinks the Clinton campaign did right and did wrong, to things that he wanted to do with the organizations he controlled but was told not to do, to more views on how the media did.
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/...987591126?mt=2
They briefly brought up a Harvard study which I hadn't seen which had some interesting observations about the media coverage. Over the course of the campaign, Clinton received quite a bit more negative coverage than did Trump. Trump got more negative coverage during the general election, but Trump was almost even positive/negative during the primaries while Clinton's coverage was almost the same mostly negative during both the primaries and the campaign. Both received equally negative coverage about fitness for office which is a false equivalence IMO. And Trump overall got more coverage.
Also raised an interesting point that when the message from the media about government is negative, that intentionally or unintentionally reinforces a campaign message about the government being negative (drain that swamp). If the negative media coverage creates anxiety, dissatisfaction and distrust that's something a populist (or fake-populist) can tap into, which Trump did with great success.
Anyway here's the study, I haven't read it all yet:
http://shorensteincenter.org/news-co...eral-election/
Which jives with the other tidbit I found interesting from the podcast, he said the internal polls from Clinton's campaign were saying that people were responding to the dark rhetoric and campaign ads from Trump. Typically politicians try to avoid that darkness and try to focus on the what we're going to do stuff because the dark stuff doesn't poll well.
EDIT: Negative vs positive news coverage over the years:
