ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s evening news shows continue to ignore great market news when it steams past their coronavirus panic and has even the slightest chance of making President Donald Trump’s economy look robust.
U.S. stocks “wrapped up their best quarter in more than 20 years,” The Wall Street Journal reported June 30. The Journal proclaimed that this was a “remarkable rally after the coronavirus pandemic brought business around the world to a virtual standstill.” ABC World News Tonight with David Muir (Tom Llamas filling in), CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell (Major Garrett filling in) and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt all censored the story.
“The S&P 500 finished the second quarter up 515.70 points, or 20%, to 3100.29, its biggest percentage gain since the last three months of 1998,” The Journal reported. The Dow Jones added “3895.72 points, or 18%, to 25812.88, its best quarter since 1987.” The Big Tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite “fared even better.” It increased “31% in the past three months and 12% for this year.”
What makes this so outrageous is that ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s digital platforms all reported the news, which makes the evening news shows's censorship worse. CBS News’s digital platform headline read, “Stocks power to best quarter since 1998 despite coronavirus cases.”
The CBS News piece suggested that one “factor that's helped keep markets climbing overall is a sense among traders that even as some states pause reopening or order some businesses shut down again in response to rising new confirmed COVID-19 cases, the economy is on the mend.” [Emphasis added.]
The trend of ignoring news when it’s good continues for the Big Three evening news shows.
U.S. retail sales soared a whopping 17.7 percent in May, for the “biggest monthly jump ever,” according to CNBC June 16. In perspective, Dow Jones-surveyed economists only expected an 8 percent increase for that month. This means the May report more than doubled expectations — by a comfortable 9.7 percent over the estimate. ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News censored this news.
Even worse, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News recently censored news on the Nasdaq Composite stock index’s “historic” close above the 10,000 mark “for the first time.'' The same evening news shows also ignored when the Nasdaq topped 10,000 for the first time June 9.
Fox Business’s Charles Payne predicted a media blackout on the latest stock market news June 30. He was spot on. Payne tweeted at 4:06 pm, “‘Stock Market Surges Higher on Spike on Covid-19 Cases.’ [N]owhere will you read the above in the financial media but if the S&P 500 was down 1.5% today it would have all been blamed on increase in virus[.] [P]art of it[’]s lazy reporting the other part a conscious effort to spread fear.”
American viewers certainly didn’t get this news if they were watching the Big Three evening news shows last night.
Contact ABC News, CBS News and NBC News and tell them to stop censoring good market news!
MRC News Analyst Nicholas Fondacaro contributed to this report.
