There is a popular belief among Republicans that the mainstream media is in cahoots with liberals. The theory, as they tell it, holds that liberals run the  mainstream  media, and therefore give favorable political coverage to Democrats and demonize conservatives. The belief is so common, in fact, that Fox News, the country s most watched news network is seen by many as restoring the  balance  between the two sides. Republicans have Fox and liberals have everything else   or so the thinking goes.It s a convenient fantasy if you re a Republican. If the media has a  liberal bias  then what they report is inherently suspect. When, say, reporters find that there was absolutely no evidence that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong during Benghazi, conservatives can sleep well knowing that it s just because those reporters are covering for her. If Republican lawmakers then waste millions of dollars and thousands of hours on that particular witchhunt, well that s fair game because the  mainstream  news wouldn t give Americans the full story.A new report done by social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon has taken that conservative narrative and blown it completely out of the water. Running a deep analysis of how much negative vs. positive media coverage each of the still active presidential candidates has received, the team found the exact opposite of what Fox News viewers might expect. Who has been viciously attacked the most during this campaign?Hillary Clinton.Which two candidates received the least amount of positive coverage? Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.Vox turned the data into a simple graph, and the results are startling.Crimson Hexagon looked at hundreds of thousands of online stories published since January of 2015. The data is nothing if not comprehensive. What this means for you and me is that for a year and a half now, we have been more-or-less constantly bombarded with negative stories about Democrats and less so about Republicans. On the flipside, an average American is more likely to hear a positive story about Kasich or Trump than they are about either of the two Democratic options.Trump may complain about how unfairly he is being treated, but from this analysis it s clear that the only ones with legitimate gripes are Sanders and Clinton.This  unfair and unbalanced  coverage of the election may explain why Hillary Clinton is seeing bafflingly high unfavorability polling, even while Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, publicly endorses things like waterboarding, religious-based discrimination, and violence towards protesters. America s a sponge and it s been soaking up the negativity for years.This may come as a shock to Fox News viewers, but their  media has a liberal bias  worldview is built on a lie. How do you convince someone to watch your network and no one else s? Tell them the rest are frauds. Fox has been beating that drum so long that at this point even they can t control the conservative base any more. Chat with a Trump or Cruz supporter and you may soon learn that Fox News is  too liberal  these days. Too. Liberal.In reality, the mainstream media has very few party loyalties. The only idol they worship is that of ratings and the best ratings come when they are drumming up controversy by promoting scandal. If that means going after Donald Trump, they ll do it. But oftentimes it also means going after Clinton and Sanders for reasons that otherwise objective reporters would see almost immediately as manufactured nonsense. Recently, just to take one egregious example, the Washington Post ran a story that claimed nearly 150 FBI agents were looking into Hillary Clinton s emails. A lot of ink was spilled over it over the next 24 hours making Clinton look very bad. And then someone bothered to track down the source: It was a Republican lawmaker. The story was nothing more than a fabricated hit piece started by a GOPer looking to hurt Clinton and used an all-too-eager Washington Post reporter to do it.Reality may have a liberal bias, but news networks sure don t.Featured image via Regine Mahaux/Getty Images