Television Networks Put Out 90 Percent Anti-Trump Spin in 2018

Everyone knows that the anti-Trump spin put out by the establishment media continues to be relentless and 2018 was no exception.

Conservative watchdog group the Media Research Center has been analyzing literally every bit of Donald Trump coverage that airs on ABC, CBS and NBC’s evening news programs that are seen by 23 million people nightly. They began their monitoring for this study in January 2017.

Here’s some of what the MRC found:

■ 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.

Obviously, MRC has done thorough work.

90 percent negative and just 10 percent positive?

That has to be some kind of record, even for the liberal media. Then again, who has the left hated more in the history of American politics than Trump?

MRC’s data also correlates with non-conservative sources. “The 90% negative spin we calculated roughly matches what the Pew Research Center, not a conservative group, found in their study of coverage of Trump’s first 60 days in office,” MRC reports. “They found 62% of network stories were negative, vs. 5% positive and 33% neutral. If you remove the neutral stories and look at just the stories with a clear spin, Pew’s bottom line looks like ours: 93% negative spin, vs. just 7% positive.”

The whole study is worth reading as a reminder of why Trump considers the press an “enemy of the people.”

is a professional writer and editor with over 15 years of experience in conservative media and Republican politics. He... More about John Hanson

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