This Thursday, despite the liberal media’s tremendous effort over the past 18 months to destroy his campaign, you’ll hear Donald Trump again accept the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The media’s effort has been intense: a new Media Research Center study found ABC, CBS and NBC devoted massive quantities of airtime (a whopping 1,608 minutes on just the three evening newscasts) to promoting the legal efforts against Trump, nearly all of it (95%) fiercely negative.
Yet the liberal media’s crusade against the former president has utterly boomeranged. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, more Americans today have a favorable view of Donald Trump than they did before this media onslaught began. (Details below.) While there are certainly other issues at play (including Americans' increasingly negative view of Joe Biden’s presidency), it’s a stark indication of the media’s dwindling influence that the public would react to such a deluge of hostile coverage with an increasingly positive view of the media’s target.
■ Pounding Trump as a “convicted felon.” The case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an openly-partisan Democrat, has received the most evening news airtime of the various cases: 485 minutes. That tally includes 94 minutes of coverage during the six weeks since the verdict (May 30 to July 10). Our analysis shows that the networks have aided Democrats’ desire to keep the anti-Trump residue of the trial front and center in the presidential campaign. Reporters used the word “crime” or “criminal” 29 times to talk about Trump’s actions; “guilty” was heard 40 times; “felony” was used 48 times, and “convicted” or “conviction” was employed 108 times.
Those loaded labels were used in everyday campaign stories, whether or not the topic was actually about the case at hand. “Back on the campaign trail for the first time since he was convicted of 34 criminal counts,” ABC’s Rachel Scott proclaimed on June 1.
Then on June 16, CBS’s Robert Costa: “Weeks after his criminal conviction, Trump is locked in a tight race with President Biden...”
Even more recently, NBC’s Lester Holt decided to set up a June 27 report on the debate by reminding viewers: “Mr. Trump enters the night under the cloud of his felony conviction...”
Yet amid all of that post-verdict coverage, only a scant four percent (3 minutes, 53 seconds) told viewers that Trump has a good case in getting those convictions overturned. “There are a lot of meritorious issues here,” legal expert Caroline Polisi explained soon after the verdict on the May 30 CBS Evening News.
Yet such important points have been overwhelmed amid the repetitive mantra of Trump as a “convicted felon.”
■ Hugely lopsided coverage of every case. While the “hush money” case received the most airtime, the others were treated as huge news as well. Over the past 18 months, the three evening newscasts committed a combined 311 minutes of airtime to special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election case against Trump, plus another 243 minutes to Smith’s indictments against Trump for allegedly mishandling documents after his presidency.
The Georgia case against Trump, brought by Fulton (GA) County District Attorney Fani Willis received 187 minutes of publicity from the networks, while the civil lawsuit brought against Trump and his companies by New York Attorney General Letitia James garnered 140 minutes of airtime. The networks donated an additional 82 minutes to the civil suit against Trump brought by New York writer E. Jean Carroll; other legal matters, plus general references to Trump’s legal issues, consumed another 161 minutes of evening news airtime.
Add it all up, and during the past 18 months Trump’s presidential campaign has faced a daunting 1,608 minutes of network evening news airtime devoted to these cases. That’s an average of about 2 minutes, 53 seconds per night, every night, since the beginning of last year.
And virtually all of this coverage has been hostile. Looking only at statements from anchors, reporters, voters and those presented as non-partisan actors (no Democrats or rival Republican campaigns), coverage of every single one of these cases has been at least 92 percent negative. (See below for a more complete explanation of our methodology).
For example, looking at the coverage of Bragg’s “hush money” case, we tallied 42 positive statements vs. 520 negative statements about Trump, which computes to a 92.5% negative spin. Coverage of the other prosecutors’ cases was even more hostile: 95.7% negative coverage of Trump regarding Smith’s January 6 case (based on 441 total statements); 95.0% anti-Trump coverage stemming from Smith’s classified documents case (379 statements); and 98.1% negative spin regarding Fani Willis’s Georgia case (213 statements).
The networks piled on Trump when they covered the civil suits against him as well: 98.3% negative when it came to Letitia James’s business fraud suit (177 statements); and 98.7% negative coverage of Trump pertaining to Carroll’s lawsuit (157 statements).
Add it all up, along with another 210 statements about other cases or that didn’t specify an individual case, and candidate Trump faced an astounding 95.3% negative press regarding his legal issues in the past 18 months.
■ Yet the public views Trump more favorably than before. Back on January 1, 2023, an average of polls calculated by RealClearPolitics showed 37.2% of Americans viewed Trump favorably; as of July 10, 2024, that had risen more than five points to 42.5%. At the same time, those viewing Trump unfavorably declined by more than two points (dropping from 56.8% to 54.5%).
These are polls of all voters, not just Republicans. That means it’s not a matter of committed MAGA voters discounting the media’s message; it’s an anti-media reaction that can be seen across the board in the public’s attitude toward the former President.
For a year and a half, these legal cases formed the lion’s share of the networks’ coverage of the GOP primaries, crowding out both Trump’s competitors and policy issues. Yet Trump coasted to an easy victory against his Republican challengers, and today leads in most general election polls.
A generation ago, it would take only a few days of such negative news coverage to chase a politician out of a national race (remember Gary Hart?). Trump’s renomination this week is new proof that today’s liberal media elite has little of the clout its predecessors once enjoyed to bend the national political environment in their direction.
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METHODOLOGY: We calculated the spin of Trump’s trial coverage by tallying all clearly positive and negative statements from non-partisan or unaffiliated sources — in other words, reporters, anchors, voters. We excluded evaluative comments from Trump himself, his staff and identified surrogates, as well as all identified Democrats. It also excludes “horse race assessments” about a candidate’s prospects for winning or losing.
