The big three media outlets–ABC, NBC, and CBS–that dominate political news are trying to shape the Republican primary while also making former President Donald Trump unelectable in the general election against Joe Biden.
The Media Research Center writes that “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 frontrunner with overwhelmingly (93%) negative coverage.
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 seven percent of the GOP coverage has been about the issues (27 minutes), vs. 320 minutes (77%) spent on Trump’s legal situation.”
On the flip side, however, the mainstream media also wants to ensure that potential Trump alternatives, who have higher approval ratings than the former president and thus would likely match up better against Joe Biden, get no traction.
The Center continued, “In the last three months, the Big Three evening newscasts spent 380 minutes discussing frontrunner Donald Trump. That’s 12 times more than his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (30 minutes), and demonstrates how the media are looking past Trump’s GOP challengers to focus solely on the frontrunner.
From January to July, Trump received a whopping 74% of all GOP candidate airtime. That increased to a staggering 87% of all candidate coverage in the last three months. The networks allotted just 14 minutes to former Vice President Mike Pence, and even less to businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (4 minutes each), former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (2 minutes), and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (just one minute).
None of the other candidates received even 60 seconds of airtime during the three months we examined.”
Rich Noyes, who led the study, told The Washington Examiner that the coverage is a perfect example of how liberals try to rig elections and shape how Americans vote.
Pointing to the fact that overwhelming negative coverage of Trump helped Joe Biden win in 2020, he told the newspaper that the liberal media is just starting earlier by shifting to attack mode a year before the election rather than the summer of next year.
“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.
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 concluded.
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