Trump Still Trashed By TV Broadcast Nets

By Rich Noyes, Newsbusters

At the midpoint of Donald Trump’s first term, the establishment media’s obvious hostility shows no signs of relenting, but polls show this negative coverage has had no discernible impact on the public’s attitudes toward the President.

Since January 20, 2017, the Media Research Center has analyzed every moment of coverage of President Trump on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, seen by approximately 23 million people each night.

Highlights:

• As it was last year, the Trump presidency was the biggest story of 2018, accounting for almost 87 hours of coverage, or 28% of all evening news airtime. But that’s down from 99 hours of coverage in 2017, perhaps a sign the networks are wearying of treating every Trump tweet as deserving of crisis-level coverage.
• The tone of coverage remains incessantly hostile: 90% negative, vs. just 10% positive (excluding neutral statements), matching the historically bad press we documented in 2017. Yet despite the media’s obvious disapproval, public opinion of the President actually improved slightly during 2018, from an average 40% approval on January 1 to 42.7% approval on December 31, according to RealClearPolitics.
• For the second year in a row, the Russia investigation was the single most-covered topic amid the networks’ Trump coverage, garnering 858 minutes of airtime. Since January 20, 2017, the Russia probe has received 2,092 minutes of coverage on just the three evening newscasts.

The highly-partisan media earn partisan reviews: The media’s confrontational stance seems to have earned them greater respect among Democratic voters, of whom 76% say they trust the media (up from 51% in 2016), according to the most recent Gallup survey.

But a meager 21% of Republicans say they trust the press, a near-record gap of 55 percentage points in how the press is viewed by voters of each party. (The record was a 58-point gap in 2017; prior to the age of Trump, this partisan gap never exceeded 40 points.)