David Muir
On Monday, President Trump called out the racist hate groups involved in Saturday’s chaos in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition to calling them “evil” and “repugnant,” Trump said: “Those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.” This full throated denouncement was exactly what the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) craved from the President, but now that they had it, they shifted their attacks to: “What took him so long?”
Over the weekend, The New York Times claimed in an article that Vice President Mike Pence was running a “shadow campaign for 2020,” which brought a scathing rebuke from Pence and President Trump. But despite the denials from the White House, on Monday, ABC’s World News Tonight ran an entire segment about the idea, laying out the evidence and only briefly mentioning the Vice President’s reaction. And they were the only network evening newscast in the Big Three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) to give the non-story any significant time.
Early Thursday morning, President Trump teased a big announcement that would be made at his campaign rally in West Virginia later in the day. The announcement leaked early and it was one liberals couldn’t stand: Jim Justice, the governor of the state, was changing his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. It’s rare for sitting governors to change their party affiliation, but that didn’t matter to ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News who ignored the news altogether.
At the White House on Wednesday the President rolled out a new legislative proposal to reform the current legal immigration system by having it focused on skilled labor and other merits. And as would be expected, the liberal media were foaming at the mouth over the new policy. Their disgust was obvious during ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News, where they smeared the move and touted irate outbursts from CNN’s Jim Acosta.
Amidst all the warranted coverage of White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s disturbingly vulgar tirade about Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News ignored the poignant White House event honoring the law enforcement officers who responded to the June 14 congressional GOP baseball shooting.
The White House declared the week of July 16, “Made in America” week to celebrate U.S. manufacturing -- a continuance of President Donald Trump’s “America First” campaign focus. But ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows minimized the administration’s focus, mentioning it only one night of the week and used it to criticize Trump.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled the revised version of the GOP health care bill on Thursday, which added provisions meant to entice both the conservative and left-leaning members of the Republican Party. And despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office had yet to release their report on the revisions, the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) wasted no time in tearing it down with the usual fake news of massive cuts to Medicaid.
Many climate change alarmists were in full panic mode on Wednesday after scientists announced that a truly massive sheet of ice weighing 1 trillion tons and the size of Delaware had finally broken off of the continent. The fear continued during the evening broadcasts of the Big Three Networks as ABC and NBC were more than happy to contribute to the hysteria. "At the bottom of the world tonight a massive fracture on the continent of Antarctica has caused one of the biggest icebergs on record to break away into the ocean. It's so big it could fill Lake Erie twice over,” hyped Anchor Lester Holt during NBC Nightly News.
A Media Research Center study of every broadcast network evening newscast in the five weeks since the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller on May 17 found a whopping 353 minutes of airtime devoted to the Russia probe, or 55 percent of all coverage of the Trump presidency during those weeks. The study also found one-third (34%) of the networks’ Russia coverage was based on anonymous sources, some of which later proved erroneous.
In the wake of the Democrats' humiliating defeat in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District Tuesday night, members of the party were in a rush to cast blame on someone. And for many Democrats that blame fell on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Even with the loud calls for new leadership, CBS News decided to omit them from their reporting Wednesday evening. Meanwhile, ABC’s coverage simply brushed over them in a 40-second-long news brief. NBC was the only network to give the blaming serious consideration.
High in the sky over the Baltic Sea on Tuesday, a United States Air Force spy plane was subjected to extremely dangerous maneuvers by a Russian fighter pilot. According to reports, at one point the Russian jet was roughly five feet away from the wing tip of the U.S. plane. The provocative encounter was reported by both ABC and NBC during their evening news broadcasts later that evening. But on CBS Evening News, not a word was spoken about the incident.
On Sunday afternoon, the body of Nabra Hassanen, a 17-year-old Muslim girl from Virginia, was discovered by police after going missing earlier that morning. The story went viral Monday with accusations that she was targeted because of her religion. According to authorities, that was not the motive of her attacker, 22-year-old Darwin Martinez Torres, road rage was. In addition, they believe him to be an illegal immigrant. Only ABC reported the story Monday evening, but they failed to mention his legal status.