Feature: Questionable media coverage dampens voter enthusiasm in U.S. election

An hour's drive south of Cleveland, the city of Tallmadge, Ohio, felt like at the heart of Donald Trump country. Yard signs, banners and posters of "make America great again" could be seen everywhere.

There was one house that stood out. In the front yard of the house erected a handmade "jail house." It was built with black wooden panels, decorated with Hillary Clinton's headshot and words of "Bengazi," "Hillary" and "Busted." A big banner of Trump 2016 was hanging on the garage.

The owner of the house, electrician Mike Turnbull, just got off work. Among the first things he said was "99 percent of the news is for Hillary."

"I'm sorry but that's how I feel. The media outlets are very biased," Turnbull said in dismay.

MEDIA BIAS IN FOCUS

U.S. Republican presidential nominee Trump himself had been feeding on the notion that the U.S. media is biased against him in this election.

"This election is being rigged by the media pushing false and unsubstantiated charges, and outright lies, in order to elect Crooked Hillary," Trump wrote in a recent tweet.

Many had questioned whether Trump's argument was fact-based, but none will doubt his words resonated with large swaths of his supporters.

"All the WikiLeaks stuff coming out on Hillary day after day, and who's covering it?"

"Nobody but Fox," Turnbull answered himself, hailing Fox News as the only media outlet that is not biased against Trump.

Another Trump supporter, Jack Baker of Springfield, Ohio, expressed the same feeling.

"The media is definitely in the Democratic corner," he said.

Turnbull and Baker both are the typical Trump supporters. They both feel the country is going downhill, and the self-sufficient, comfortable middle-class lifestyle are slipping away from them.

Baker, who worked manufacturing at the International Harvester Company in the 1970s and 80s, "I left there making 16 dollars and 43 cents an hour, and that was in 1983. The same company just hired people this year to work at the factory for 14 dollars and 50 cents per hour."

"How can somebody 30 years later getting less than what they were paying back then," he complained.

It were not just Turnbull and Baker who felt that way. In the latest poll released by Suffolk University/USA Today, 75.9 percent of the 1,000 adults surveyed believed that the media wants the Democratic presidential nominee to win, and only 7.9 percent said Trump was the one the media supports.

Mitch Verheyen, a 35-year-old cook from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania said the biases of the media have big influences on regular voters, which can sway political races into unwanted results.

"How does it feel that people sit at home and they know the candidate they like ain't gonna make it," Verheyen asked.

Feelings of a "rigged" media appeared prevalent among Republican voters in the battleground states. The reasons may not be baseless, but experts said the feelings of imbalanced reporting actually originated from Trump himself.

"It has been a long held criticism towards the American media that they tend to present liberal biases," said Jingsi Wu, assistant professor of journalism, media studies and public relations at Hofstra University.

Wu said people tend to form such an impression even more easily in this particular election, because of the very controversial and politically incorrect opinions that Trump constantly voices.

"Journalists seem to not be able to help themselves but convey some criticisms of Trump," Wu added.

Journalists' dislike for Trump was most pronounced in this election cycle. Various notable publications in the U.S. endorse candidates of their choice as a tradition, and this year a total of 414 daily and weekly newspapers, magazines, college and university newspapers endorsed Clinton, while only 11 endorsed Trump.

For the Trump camp, such a small number of endorsements for a major-party candidate is unprecedented in American history, which in turn reinforced the negative opinions against the mainstream media among Trump voters.

UNWELCOMED CHASE FOR RATINGS

The feeling of media biases may echo more often within the Trump camp, but the groan of discontent with the media's negative reporting throughout this election cycle had reverberated far and loud among voters from both sides.

"This country has been falling apart," said Steve Dotson of Springfield, Ohio, warehouse worker and father of four boys.

Dotson and his wife Olivia Mansfield, a Walmart cashier, said they were definitely reluctant to vote, but they would vote for Clinton. They hoped a Clinton presidency could bring a better future for their kids.

"Everything's always negative, that's all you see in the media," Dotson said.

Mansfield felt the same. "They know that it would be a circus between the two of them and they'll get more ratings."

A recent Gallup poll found that American public' s trust in the media in 2016 has fallen to its lowest point since 1972, with only 32 percent of people saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media.

It was a sharp 8 percentage-point drop compared to 2015. The drop of trust in media was more evident among Republicans, which plummeted to 14 percent from 32 percent a year ago. It was Trump's sharp criticisms of the media that disheartened them, the pollsters deduced.

"The election campaign may be the reason that it has fallen so sharply this year," writes Art Swift of Gallup.

Experts acknowledged that the media's innate drive for ratings are the reason for the negative coverage of the election, but they were merely appeasing their established audience like they always did.

"It is a failure of the American media to continue their focus on the dramatic and the spectacular, at the cost of pressing candidates on their policy stances," said Wu.

"At the same time, there is some great quality journalism that upholds the gold standard of long-form, investigative reporting, but they do not get nearly as much attention," she added.

"The media are trying to attract audiences for their organizations like a business in the marketplace," said Robert Shapiro, professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.

Despite his constant complaining, Trump had greatly benefitted from the very behavior of the mainstream media. Analysts estimated that Trump has got the equivalent of about 2 billion U.S. dollars in free media publicity, by the massive news coverage of his multiple controversial remarks and scandals.

"He has saved a lot of money on advertising because of it and this is why overall presidential election spending may be less this year than in 2012," Shapiro said.

But the average voters, especially those who lost interest in both candidates because of the non-stop negative coverage of the 2016 presidential race, just want to get over the election.

"I'm excited that it would be over," said Paul Shaia, who works in commercial real estate in Cleveland, Ohio.

Shaia told Xinhua that because he didn't like either Clinton or Trump, he'll be voting for third-party candidate Gary Johnson.

"And then the news will focus on something else other than dividing people and negativity, and quick headlines and sound bite," he said. Enditem

(Editing by Zhou Xiaozheng, Zheng Jie; Xinhua reporters Shang Yang and Zhang Zhihuan also contributed to the stor