Media Reality Check

Liberal cable news outlets evidently had their own fairy tale ending in mind when former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations: impeachment. On Wednesday, CNN and MSNBC reporters, anchors, and paid contributors used the word an absurd 222 times in 18 hours. 

By far, the biggest news story of the Trump presidency has been the Russia investigation. As of August 15, the three broadcast network evening newscasts have devoted a combined 1,854 minutes to the probe, or nearly one-fifth (19.6%) of all of their Trump news. Yet virtually none of that airtime (just 62 minutes, or 3.3%) has been spent scrutinizing Robert Mueller’s investigation — a big shift…

The media are hyping former White House aide Omarosa’s negative takes on “racist” Donald Trump and of course playing audio from her surreptitious tapes – with the networks devoting 93 minutes on the topic so far. On Monday’s Today show, co-host Savanna Guthrie teased: “Just ahead, our exclusive - live with Omarosa on the secret recording she made of President Trump...and the troubling picture she…

Early Friday, NewsBusters reported that CNN spent only one minute of airtime on the recanting of a former Ohio State University wrestler’s allegations against Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan. After reviewing coverage of the original NBC article which leveled the claims against Jordan, NewsBusters found that there was a massive discrepancy in reporting.

Following the arrest of Republican Congressman Chris Collins, the broadcast networks once again showcased their partisan double standard when it comes to corruption allegations against members of Congress. Collins’s arrest on Wednesday on insider trading charges resulted in a deluge of coverage, over 18 minutes in less than 24 hours. But in 2015 and 2016, ABC, CBS and NBC buried the indictment,…

During the 18 months of the Trump presidency, immigration has received more airtime on the three broadcast evening news shows than any other policy topic. The networks’ coverage has been relentlessly hostile to the administration (92% negative, just 8% positive), largely because these newscasts have framed nearly all of their coverage around the plight of those adversely affected by the…

Since the 1980s, the well-worn liberal playbook is to claim that Republican appointees to the Supreme Court should be voted down as ideologues who are outside the judicial mainstream. The establishment media aids this tactic by often tagging GOP nominees as “conservative,” while ignoring — or even disputing — the liberal bent of Democratic nominees to the Court. True to form, ABC, CBS and NBC’s…

The 17-year-long war in Afghanistan continues, with nearly 15,000 U.S. troops currently deployed to support the fight against Taliban and ISIS forces, but you’d barely know it from watching any of the three broadcast network evening newscasts. The three newscasts combined have aired barely 32 minutes on the war this year, or a paltry one-third of one percent of their total evening news airtime.

Outraged anchors and correspondents at ABC, CBS and NBC attacked the Trump administration for separating children from parents at the border as they overwhelmed their Monday morning and evening news programs with a massive 94 minutes of coverage on the detainment policy. Overall, in just six days of coverage (June 13 through June 18) the nets have flooded their broadcasts with almost three hours…

The pundit class have lost their minds over the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border enforcement policy. Since Friday, the collective breakdown has yielded a total of 22 instances in which cable news commentators compared the separation of parents and children illegally entering the country to World War II-era war crimes and human rights violations. 

While liberal journalists are pooh-poohing in advance any sort of success Donald Trump may have with his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, that wasn’t the case back in 1994 when Bill Clinton struck a that would have supposedly resolved the nuclear threat from North Korea.

CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta has suggested President Trump is a “racist,” while whining that Trump’s complaints about press bias were doing “real damage to the First Amendment,” speculating that some day we might see “a dead journalist on the side of the highway, because of the rhetoric coming out of the White House.” Then on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Acosta said this about his Trump…

In the past ten weeks, lawyer Michael Avenatti, who is representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against President Trump, has been interviewed a staggering 147 times on broadcast and cable news shows. More than half of those interviews (74) were on CNN, which almost certainly makes Avenatti the most ubiquitous guest in the network’s history. No guest — not Donald Trump or Bernie…