Americans divided on media treatment of Trump: Gallup

US President Donald Trump and First Lady MelaniaTrump arrive for the 60th Annual Red Cross Gala at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on February 4, 2017. [AFP File Photo/ MANDEL NGAN]

Two weeks since newly-elected US President Donald Trump took office, Americans are split in their assessments of whether the US news media is covering the Trump administration fairly, a new Gallup poll found.

Just over a third of Americans, at 36 percent, think the media has been too tough on Trump, while just under a third, or 31 percent, think it has been about right, according to the poll.

Twenty-eight percent say the media has not been tough enough. Republicans overwhelmingly believe the media has been too tough on Trump, the poll found.

However, this masks broad disapproval among Republicans, who mostly believe the media -- which Trump has declared "the opposition party" -- is being too hard on the new Republican president. Meanwhile, about half of Democrats think the media should be tougher on Trump, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

Trump's team has battled against what it describes as the US media' s unfair coverage of a number of issues. The White House has fought against some media estimates of the size of Trump's inauguration crowd being relatively small, and against media descriptions of Trump's visa ban as a "Muslim ban," for example, Gallup noted.

This comes against this backdrop of nearly three in four Republicans, or 74 percent, saying the media has been too tough on Trump.

Democrats, on the other hand, are more divided, with 49 percent saying the media has not been tough enough and 40 percent saying its coverage has been about right.

The public's mood, according to this late January poll, differs from January 2009, when only 11 percent of Americans thought the US news media had been too tough on then newly-elected President Barack Obama.

Nearly half, or 48 percent, thought the media was about right in its coverage of Obama and his administration, while 38 percent said it was not tough enough, Gallup found.