On the day that Devon Archer, a business associate and longtime friend of Hunter Biden, testified before the House Oversight committee, CNN and MSNBC instead flooded the airwaves with their favorite topic: Donald Trump. Between 6:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. eastern, CNN and MSNBC made a combined 759 mentions of Donald Trump, while at the same time mentioning Devon Archer just 48 times.
During the specified timespan, MSNBC featured 461 mentions of the former President, while CNN supplied the remaining 298. Meanwhile, CNN mentioned Devon Archer only 37 times during the same period, while MSNBC mentioned him just 11 times. That’s a more than 41-to-1 ratio of Trump mentions to Archer mentions for the latter network.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe during the 8:00 a.m. hour somehow managed to bring up the former President by name a jaw-dropping 70 times (212 times across the whole show). Meanwhile, Archer was not discussed at any point during that program’s four-hour runtime.
Here’s what that looked like:
On CNN, the heavy lifting was done by the 6:00 a.m. hour of CNN This Morning, during which Trump was discussed a still hefty 56 times. No show on either network fell below single digits.
Meanwhile, Devon Archer’s testimony on Monday was only referenced in three MSNBC shows and five CNN shows. While CNN did actually discuss why he was testifying, MSNBC offered very little meaningful information. Of course, both networks were also rife with dismissals of House Republicans’ ongoing investigation into the Biden family.
This is the second time in three months that we’ve noticed so much Trump talk on the cable networks that we had to go back and tally all of it up. And amazingly, today’s morning and daytime numbers were even worse than they were last time. We can expect Trump’s prevalence on these networks to remain strong throughout the 2024 election season.
