TV news 93% negative on Trump, ‘election interference’ by media

The big three TV networks — CBS, NBC, and ABC — are doing their best to live up to former President Donald Trump’s charge that they are “truly the enemy of the people.”

According to a new three-month study of media coverage of the GOP primaries and legal challenges facing Trump, 93% percent of the coverage has been negative for him alone.

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“With the third Republican presidential debate set for Wednesday, the big three broadcast networks have abandoned their coverage of former President Donald Trump’s Republican presidential challengers. Instead, their evening newscasts have assumed the challenger role themselves, pounding the front-runner with overwhelmingly 93% negative coverage,” according to a Media Research Center report from Rich Noyes.

In his review in the third quarter, he also found that the networks are devoting an overwhelming majority of their Republican coverage to Trump’s legal woes, not the dominant matters in the GOP presidential nominating fight.

“Presidential election campaigns are a time for a party to showcase its ideas, but the networks are also suppressing Republicans’ policy agenda in favor of overwhelming coverage of the legal cases brought against Trump by various Democratic prosecutors. Less than 7% of the GOP coverage has been about the issues (27 minutes), vs. 320 minutes (77%) spent on Trump’s legal situation,” Noyes said in his analysis shared with Secrets.

The TV blackout of the GOP race and key Trump challengers comes as the former president is in his first big trial, the civil fraud case in New York. Network cameras have been parked at the court’s entrance, and cable news has provided 24-hour analysis of the case.

Noyes said negative coverage of Trump helped Joe Biden win in 2020. He said that the liberal media are playing the same game plan for 2024 but earlier than normal, shifting to offense a year before the election.

“With the 2024 campaign well underway, history is repeating itself: The networks are once again hitting Donald Trump with the worst press ever faced by a leading politician,” he said.

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In the past, MRC said Trump faced the “worst press ever.” Now, it said the media are going one step further in trying to interfere with the election.

“In a little over three months, Iowa’s Republican voters will start the process of selecting the party’s 2024 president nominee. But a look at campaign coverage so far shows that the networks have already moved beyond the GOP presidential race, ignoring Trump’s challengers to take aim at the front-runner as they did in 2020. It’s called ‘election interference,’” Noyes said.