Joe Biden’s polling is cratering. The three latest surveys out have his approval rating at 40, 42 and 40. Yet, you wouldn’t know that if you watched the network morning and evening newscasts in December. The Biden protection racket was in full force as ABC, CBS and NBC allowed a combined 75 seconds on the Democratic President’s tanking numbers.
During December, NBC’s Today and Nightly News avoided all talk of the Democrat’s slumping polls. On ABC, Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos mentioned the bad news for just nine seconds.
ABC journalists were ignoring themselves because this was a survey partially conducted by ABC itself (along with Ipsos). CBS did the best, a still pathetic 66 seconds.
Even though the month of December saw a Covid surge and the highest inflation since 1982, here’s the sum total of ABC’s weekday morning and evening coverage for the month. On December 13, GMA co-host Stephanopoulos quickly announced: “Also, a new ABC News/IPSOS poll suggests more two thirds of Americans disapprove of President Biden's handling of inflation. A solid majority, 57 percent, disapprove of the economy in general.”
Watch the video below of Stephanopoulos racing through the numbers:
Though NBC’s morning and evening newscasts skipped the bad polling for Biden, that wasn't true for the Sunday chat show. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd tried to find a happy spin for the President. On December 5, 2021, he noted that college graduates still like Biden:
As for President Biden approval rating, this is where we can show you that, even among voters under 30, there is an education divide like there is all across the electorate. If you have a college degree or you`re in college, you have a net positive rating on the president. By the way, this 54-44 isn't a great number for the president, but it's a net positive among young voters with a college degree. If you have no college degree, you disapprove of this president 57 percent, very similarly to older parts of the electorate.
On the December 11, 2021 CBS Mornings Saturday, the journalists managed to not mention bad polling for Biden while talking about crippling inflation: “A new Labor Department report says inflation rose by almost seven percent in the last year, the highest one-year increase in 39 years. President Biden says the increase has peaked and that prices should begin to fall sooner than expected. But Mr. Biden acknowledged Americans are feeling the pinch in their wallets.”
The sum total of CBS’s mentions of bad polling news came on December 12. In a softball interview for CBS Sunday Mornings, Rita Braver asked First Lady Jill Biden: “You’ve seen the President’s poll numbers drop. Does that bother you?”
She then followed-up with a gentle question about polling on the President’s mental fitness:
RITA BRAVER: And one more question on that, on the polls because there’s been some recent polls that show that quite a few Americans have some questions about the President`s current mental fitness as somebody who spends -- I can see you shaking your head.
JILL BIDEN: Yes.
BRAVER: So, what’s your response to that?
BIDEN: I think that’s ridiculous.
Add in five seconds on the December 12 Evening News and you have all 66 seconds from CBS in December.
In October, I wrote a study for NewsBusters explaining that, during the same time period in 2017, the networks covered Biden’s bad polling by almost two-to-one more than Donald Trump’s low numbers. With inflation, Covid and other ongoing disasters for the administration, the election year of 2022 could be even more brutal for Biden. ABC, CBS and NBC will continue to try and protect the incumbent Democrat. But the evidence says their efforts aren’t working.
