Since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign exactly one month ago on June 16, ABC, CBS and NBC have aired a combined 31 evening news stories discussing his comment about illegal Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Is that amount of coverage excessive? Well, consider that when then-President Bill Clinton was accused of rape, those same newscasts aired just four stories mentioning those charges during a 12-month period from March 1998 through March 1999.
The four: On March 28, 1998, the NBC Nightly News ran a full story on how Clinton, then the Attorney General of Arkansas, allegedly raped Juanita Broaddrick in a hotel room in 1978. Nightly News provided no further coverage; when NBC’s Lisa Myers taped an exclusive on-camera interview with Broaddrick for Dateline, anchor Tom Brokaw would only mention it in a brief promo at the end of his February 24, 1999 newscast.
The CBS Evening News ran a single report on Broaddrick’s charges during their Saturday, February 20, 1999 newscast. ABC mentioned the case in passing during a March 7, 1999 World News Sunday report about an interview given by whistleblower Linda Tripp; twelve days later, World News Tonight viewers saw a brief clip of then-White House correspondent Sam Donaldson questioning Clinton about the case at a March 19, 1999 news conference: “Can you tell us what your relationship with Ms. Broaddrick was?”
According to Nexis, there’s been no additional discussion of Broaddrick’s charge since then on the evening newscasts — not during Bill Clinton’s book tour, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, or even as a point of reference in discussions of other scandals.
If an alleged rape by a sitting President (with an accuser willing to go on camera to make the charge herself) can earn so little news coverage, what about the comment by a presidential candidate that some of the Mexicans illegally entering the U.S. are “rapists”?
Since June 16, ABC has talked about Trump’s comment and the fallout from it in eight stories on its evening newscast, while CBS discussed it in six reports. For its part, the NBC Nightly News has run a whopping 17 stories in the past 30 days on Trump’s comment — an average of about one every other day.
Correspondents haven’t held back from openly criticizing Trump. NBC’s Chuck Todd called the candidate “a late-night joke,” “the proverbial skunk at the garden party” and “a political streaker”— all in one newscast (June 17).
On June 25, ABC’s World News Tonight reporter Tom Llamas used tweets as evidence of an anti-Trump backlash: “Major Latino celebrities slammed Trump; Ricky Martin tweeting in Spanish, ‘The Republican candidate has hate and ignorance in his heart.’”
On July 6, the networks were still pounding away. NBC correspondent Peter Alexander called Trump’s comment “inflammatory,” and said they were “driving a wedge in a crowded Republican field desperate to win Latino votes.”
And on Monday’s World News Tonight, ABC anchor David Muir twice asked newly-announced Scott Walker to respond to Trump: “You could very well be on that debate stage with Trump. And, if he said on that stage what he said about Mexicans, what would you say to him?”
It’s a fact that many were offended by what Donald Trump said a month ago, even as many others liked the idea of a candidate who would shake up the establishment status quo.
But is an offensive remark four times as newsworthy as a potential crime?
