This week, illegal alien Jose Ibarra was convicted of the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. PBS and NPR have aired next to nothing on Riley over the last 6 months. Curtis Houck and Bill D'Agostino explain their studies of broadcast and cable news coverage of the Laken Riley trial.
AP's insensitive headline was "Man convicted of murder" of Laken Riley. The lead paragraph just said "A Venezuelan man has been convicted of murder in the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, a case that fueled the national debate over immigration."
There was nothing on the Laken Riley trial until it was over. There was nothing on Laken Riley’s murder on PBS over the last six months. Finally, when the trial was over, NewsHour anchor Geoff Bennett gave it 31 seconds. "A Venezuelan man was convicted today," he said, and "Ibarra entered the U.S. illegally in 2022." But the same show gave ten minutes to Trump "rolling back" transgender rights.
NPR's newscasts aired no segment in the last six months on Laken Riley until after the election. When reporter Sarah Kallis talked to a Trump voter named Caden Cromer about why he voted for Trump on November 10. Kallis was callous as she said Riley was “allegedly killed by an undocumented migrant.” She concluded: “For some Trump voters like Cromer, safety and migration seem linked, and Trump has promised mass deportations. But research has shown undocumented migrants are not more likely to commit violent crimes than U.S. citizens.”
Curtis Houck's study showed ABC, CBS, and NBC gave 20 minutes and 33 seconds to the Laken Reily trial over five days, which was about one-fourth of the coverage they devoted to the "garbage-gate" story against Donald Trump in the final days of the presidential campaign. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's joke about Puerto Rican being an island of garbage went on for 77 minutes of attention. Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly saying Trump was a "fascist" also became a big story, with almost 65 minutes of coverage.
Bill D'Agostino's study of CNN and MSNBC found a big difference between daytime and primetime coverage of the Riley trial. CNN aired one two-minute segment on Riley in primetime, and MSNBC aired nothing in primetime. Overall, CNN aired roughly 225 minutes of Riley trial coverage, and MSNBC aired 66 minutes. But coverage of Ibarra's illegal status was a tiny percentage of the air time (three percent on CNN, two percent on MSNBC).
Bill reported “the most heavily obfuscated detail was the fact that Jose Ibarra was released from federal detention into the country by the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security. MSNBC never bothered to inform their viewers of this ancillary detail, while CNN mentioned it just once.”
While the networks energetically connect everything to Trump that's negative, they don't want to attach Biden to any of the consequences of his mass importation.
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