Donald Trump may not be a big reader, but he is obsessed with the news. And when it comes to picking which outlets to read and share, Trump favors publications that "largely [flatter] and [confirm] that which he claims to be true," BuzzFeed News reports.
Of 2,687 hyperlinks tweeted by Trump since he announced his candidacy in June 2015, BuzzFeed News discovered that Trump most often shares news from Breitbart.com — perhaps no surprise, as former Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon left the website to join Trump's campaign and is now Trump's senior White House adviser.
But while BuzzFeed's analysis also found Trump reads his share of mainstream media publications like The Washington Post and The New York Post, it also found Trump's "preferred content seems to be right-leaning, hyper-partisan sites and opinion blogs including Daily Caller (21 links), Newsmax (18), the Gateway Pundit (14 links), [and] the Conservative Treehouse (11)," among others.
Our analysis revealed a media ecosystem that appears to largely reinforce and affirm the views publicly expressed by Trump and his closest advisers. The news stories Trump tweets share several characteristics: 1) They often favor sensationalism over facts and reporting; 2) They frequently echo direct quotes from Trump himself or his closest advisers; and 3) They routinely malign his enemies and vindicate his most controversial opinions. [BuzzFeed News]
In addition to crunching the numbers, BuzzFeed News published an interactive cloud of Trump's favorite media organizations, which you can browse in depth here.