Since a July 7 Justice Department memo declared an “exhaustive review” of the Jeffrey Epstein case found he died by suicide and there was no evidence of a “client list,” ABC, CBS, and NBC have treated the so-called “Epstein Files” as the new Russiagate, submerging President Trump with a stunning 821 minutes of coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC.
A Media Research Center analysis examined all mentions of Epstein (and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell) starting July 7 on ABC, CBS, and NBC across their flagship morning and evening newscasts and the Sunday political talk shows.
Through Tuesday morning, ABC accounted for roughly 358 minutes of the overall total, which was nearly double CBS at 187 minutes. In between, NBC clocked in at almost 276 minutes.
ABC also had the most time on all three sets of newscasts. ABC’s World News Tonight accounted for nearly 119 minutes of the combined evening total (118:52), which came out to 274 minutes with the addition of the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News.
“We do begin tonight with the extraordinary scene playing out on Capitol Hill today. Survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein standing by the Capitol, some coming before the cameras for the first time...The group of women sharing their stories, what they say they survived, saying there should be a vote...to make these files public,” declared anchor David Muir on the September 3 World News Tonight.
NBC Nightly News had almost 101 minutes (100:37) of declarations of doom, buoyed by multiple interviews with victims and the siblings of Virginia Giuffre by Sunday anchor Hallie Jackson.
On July 27, Jackson refused to budge from this obsession with tying Trump to a notorious sex criminal, implying Trump’s landmark trade deal with the European Union was a distraction from Epstein.
Even though there’s no evidence Trump had any role in Epstein unspeakable acts, anchor Tom Llamas boasted on November 12 that Epstein’s sex crimes have “haunted President Trump’s second term” with the breaking news having been the release of “20,000 pages of documents...including e-mails from Epstein that mentioned Donald Trump” and thus “shin[ed] a renewed light on the pair’s history.”
Llamas again framed the Epstein case on November 17 as perilous for Trump:
It has been one of the biggest pressure points of President Trump's second term, the Epstein files. For months, the President fought the full release of what the Department of Justice had gathered on the case, but today, facing growing pressure from within his own party, he changed his mind....The DOJ has long said they found no basis for charging anyone else in the Epstein conspiracy, but now those who fought so hard for the release believe they are on the brink of finally getting the answers they've been searching for.
The CBS Evening News was well behind and just shy of 55 minutes (54:42).
Co-anchor John Dickerson giddily led off the July 16 show by telling viewers President Trump’s “frustrations were boiling over” with “ang[er] at fellow Republicans he believes are obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
Two days later, Dickerson touted Epstein’s crimes as dogging Trump:
President Trump has been trying desperately to get the Jeffrey Epstein case off the front pages, but he just put it back on by taking steps to file a libel suit against one of the largest newspapers in America, The Wall Street Journal. This for reporting Mr. Trump once sent a bawdy birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, which the President denies.
The Epstein scandal has a long way to go to meet the original Russiagate tally of 2,284 minutes on these same newscasts, but 274 minutes in only five months is a serviceable start.
Given the salacious nature of Epstein’s vile crimes and his massive wealth, this story was tailor-made for morning TV. That was reflected as our analysis found 398 minutes with a tight battle as ABC’s Good Morning America (141 minutes) edged out CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today, which were both at 128 minutes (128:35 and 128:40, respctively).
On July 14, Good Morning America co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos celebrated the scandal’s eruption as “a political crisis for President Trump” and predicted this was “not” going “to be going away.”
ABC Capitol Hill correspondent Jay O’Brien declared on September 9 the Epstein case has been “a controversy that has consumed Capitol Hill and even some of the President’s most loyal supporters.”
As it turned out, those e-mails the left had hoped would prove Trump was an accessory to Epstein’s evils showed the opposite and ran in contradiction to the late Virginia Giuffre’s insistence Trump never did anything wrong.
During the November 12 show, GMA scrapped a few blocks of fluff — think celebrity interviews, cooking segments, a Disney promo, or shopping infomercials — that define the back end of morning TV so O’Brien could deliver a full report (likely thanks to an embargo agreement) on new files released by House Democrats.
As for NBC, chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander boasted to Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker on the July 24 Today that “President Trump is no stranger to scandal” with “a series of them since his first run for office...but this one is sticking to him unlike any of the others before.”
That same day on CBS Mornings, senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe declared “[t]he case of Jeffrey Epstein...is a political headache for President Trump that won't go away.”
NBC’s Alexander said a week later on July 30 that “the uproar, the headlines really about Jeffrey Epstein are not going away” for Trump despite being “frustrated by his administration’s handling of the anger around the Justice Department’s decision not to release the files.”
Finally, the Sunday morning political talk shows were not immune from viewing this scandal as a way to somehow sully the President. Our review yielded just over 148 minutes with ABC’s This Week responsible for the lion’s share at nearly 98 minutes (97:58).
NBC’s Meet the Press was plenty interested as well with 46 minutes (46:19), but CBS’s Face the Nation with moderator Margaret Brennan showed remarkable restrain as it only mentioned on six out of a possible 19 shows for a total of three minutes and 45 seconds.
Leaving aside the fact they showed little interest in the Epstein case during the Biden administration, the networks have spent this week spotlighting a new ad featuring a number of Epstein victims, arguing they should not be ignored and deserve to see justice even though the main perpetrator is long dead.
And this push came following the history-making, 44-day-long government shutdown that brought havoc to the economy and ruin to millions. Despite that, the networks combined for 80 minutes and 25 seconds — the third highest total and largest since the last full week of July — on the week the shutdown came to an end.
As for why, our Jorge Bonilla wrote this about the November 12 evening newscasts, alluding to Epstein: “The Elitist Media were desperate to find an offramp as the government shutdown drew to a close. And they did, pivoting back to an old favorite but with a new, salacious angle.”
Another thought came via CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings, who said on the November 12 The Source that the goal of the left’s focus on Epstein is a “thinly veiled” implication “that Donald Trump did something untoward, unethical or worse” with Epstein despite there never having been “a shred of evidence that Donald Trump has done anything wrong.”
