From Ely Erlich.

Is Donald Trump a bad president or does the media exaggerate his faults?

Neither.

The media isn't exaggerating his faults, they are deliberately pushing a false narrative for political purposes.

I'll give you a recent example from a blatant CNN-NYT tag-team which was an all new low, even for them.

First I'll show it through their eyes, then mine.

The following comments are based on the following video entitled Watch how Trump reacts to Nadia Murad's harrowing survival of ISIS captivity - CNN Video.

Here CNN wants you to "watch" Trump's reaction.

And the New York Times "opinion" piece Opinion | Trump's Inhumanity Before a Victim of Rape.

Since I don't have a NYT account, I'll take the quotes from Rod Vessels's answer to Does Donald Trump respect women? which has by now received over two thousand upvotes.

Now as you can see from the interesting picture above, President Trump appears to be looking off into the distance.

The CNN caption reiterates that it is a "horrific" story and the President "appears to be unfamiliar with her story."

So the message CNN is conveying is "horror story", "look at Trump" and "he isn't familiar with her story."

Enter the New York Times opinion piece:

"Allow me to render the scene in the present tense. Trump sits there at his desk, an uncomprehending, unsympathetic, uninterested cardboard dummy. He looks straight ahead for much of the time, not at her, his chin jutting in his best effort at a Mussolini pose. He cannot heave his bulk from the chair for this brave young woman. He cannot look at her."

Lets take a look at the dictator photo provided:

Indeed he looks like a dictator…

Now lets look how NYT capitalizes on his one, apparent, mistake (emphasis added):

"Every now and again, in a disdainful manner, he swivels his head toward her and other survivors of religious persecution. When Murad says, "They killed my mom, my six brothers," Trump responds: "Where are they now?"

Where are they now???

"They are in the mass graves in Sinjar," Murad says. She is poised and courageous throughout in her effort to communicate her story in the face of Trump’s complete, blank indifference.

Why this extraordinary attitude from Trump? Well, at a guess, Murad is a woman, and she is brown, and he is incapable of empathy, and the Trump administration recently watered down a United Nations Security Council resolution on protecting victims of sexual violence in conflict.

So it's because she is a woman and brown? [i.e. the misogynistic racist narrative]

I'll explain later why I’m bringing this quote:

Let's play how-well-does-President-Trump-know-Sinjar? It’s a wildly implausible game.

Toward the end of the exchange, Trump asks Murad about her Nobel Prize. "That’s incredible," he says. "They gave it to you for what reason?"

Above is the CNN angle, that he "doesn’t know anything about Murad."

OK, now lets watch the CNN video and see how much of the picture above is true.

CNN introduces Murad with a detailed introduction, explaining her story, and then ends with the statement that when she visited the White House: "President Trump didn’t seem familiar with her story." (Unlike you, the watcher, who knows it well because I just happened to provide it to you 2 seconds ago.) Watch as Murad pleads with the President to help the Yazidis.

Now watching the video: President Trump is paying attention to what she says.

When does he look away?

At 0:55, when she says that ISIS killed her brothers and her mom, the man who is "incapable of empathy," according to the NYT narrative, turns away and shakes his head.

Thereafter indeed he looks at her less as she continues her harrowing story.

The NYT mentions this "…his chin jutting in his best effort at a Mussolini pose. He cannot heave his bulk from the chair for this brave young woman. He cannot look at her."

Is it because, as they say, he is a dictator?

Is it "disdain" or "blank indifference?"

IS IT BECAUSE SHE IS A "BROWN" WOMAN?

Or is it because it is hard to look at a person describing how their family was murdered?

Now here is where it gets interesting.

At 1:56 President Trump says they will look into it and thanks her and she moves away thinking it is finished.

He then prompts her and says "and you had the Nobel prize…they gave it to you for what reason, maybe you can explain."

Sounds like CNN is right?

That, the President "appears to be unfamiliar with her story."

Except for two small points, the first being that she didn’t say anything about the prize, he knew about it.

The second being that when he asks her to explain he points to the cameras.

The President didn’t call in the cameras to record her telling him her story, he was providing her a televised platform to publicize her cause.

This entire CNN narrative of him not being aware of her story is completely false. Fake, deceitful, spin, pick any word you like.

He is prompting her with questions to facilitate her, to let tell her story to the cameras, to the American public, not because he doesn't know it.

Her current cause notably being to publicize that the war isn't over, as she says, ISIS is gone but the region is still in a state of chaos due to Kurdish and Iraqi fighting.

"Every now and again, in a disdainful manner, he swivels his head toward her and other survivors of religious persecution. When Murad says, "They killed my mom, my six brothers," Trump responds: "Where are they now?""

Where are they now???

"They are in the mass graves in Sinjar," Murad says. She is poised and courageous throughout in her effort to communicate her story in the face of Trump's complete, blank indifference.

EDIT TO MY ORIGINAL ANSWER - many thanks for the transcript below. I now see the NYT cut out some important words from their quote:

Did the NYT deliberately omit those words? I can't remember a news outlet quoting only the first half of someone's sentence and leaving the end of the quote with a comma.

Especially when so much ire has been heaped on the question that followed directly to those words.

If those words would have been left in, there would have been a debate between pro-Trump advocates about the meaning of his question.

Regardless of this relatively small point, at the end of the clip she does describe the unknown fate of her living family:

"We don’t know if they killed everyone, if they are in jail, but we know they have 3000 Yazidi women and children including my niece, my nephew my sister in law. Three years ago she called and said now I am in Syria and now we didn't know anything about her."

So bearing in mind that the purpose of the televised broadcast was to let her describe the Yazidi cause, President Trump was clearly, in my opinion, referring to her missing family who were left behind and whose fate is still unknown.

He knew about her missing family…before she spoke in front of the cameras.

In summary:

This was a pre-planned event to give publicity to the Yazidi plight.

However, the CNN/NYT demonization tactics can't allow any good deed to go unpunished. Rather than allow the President to publicize a just cause, remarking on the thousands of women and children enslaved or in limbo right now, they deliberately divert people's attention to "Trump's racist misogynistic dictatorial behavior." In doing so, they sacrifice the Yazidi cause as a necessary evil.

Who is evil here?