The December edition of the CBS News/New York Times poll came out on Thursday and, naturally, the results were covered on the CBS Evening News but, as per the liberal media’s usual pattern, it left out a slew of poll results in which voters gave President Obama poor marks on terrorism, the fight against ISIS, and how the country remains on the wrong track.
Instead, CBS chose to devote all of its coverage (two and a half minutes) concerning its own poll to the results pertaining to the 2016 Republican field and how Donald Trump remains the frontrunner despite his calls to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
In an article summarizing the questions that its polling partner skipped, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Dalia Sussman explained right off the top that “Americans are more fearful about the likelihood of another terrorist attack than at any other time since the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001.”
As for a specific number, they reported that “[f]orty-four percent of the public says an attack is “very” likely to happen in the next few months, the most in Times or CBS News polls since October 2001, just after the deadliest terrorist assault in the country’s history.”
The pair also noted that terrorism has skyrocketed to the top issue in the minds of voters (at 19 percent) following recent Islamic terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino with “[s]even in 10 Americans now call[ing] the Islamic State extremist group a major threat to the United States’ security, the highest level since the Times/CBS News poll began asking the question last year.”
The President’s standing on these issues took yet another tumble, but the topic was nowhere near to be found on the CBS Evening News airwaves as the obsession over Trump’s lead continued to distract attention away from Obama and the administration’s foreign policy. Martin and Sussman laid out the poor ratings for the President:
The public has little faith in President Obama’s handling of terrorism and the threat from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Fifty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of terrorism, and seven in 10 say the fight against the Islamic State is going badly.
Further, the December poll found that only “24 percent say the country is head in the right direction, the lowest figure in a Times or CBS News survey in more than two years.” Not surprisingly, disgust with Washington was the view of more than half those surveyed (54 percent) plus 31 percent saying they’re “angry” about the state of affairs there.
Along with none of these numbers being uttered by CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley or chief White House correspondent Major Garrett in his full segment discussing Trump’s massive lead (35 percent to Ted Cruz’s 15 percent), the billionaire also allowed the newscast to duck another inconvenient narrative in that there’s growing support among the American people for gun rights:
What has shifted notably are attitudes on gun control. Only 44 percent of Americans favor a ban on assault weapons, 19 percentage points lower than after the mass shooting in Tucson in 2011. And while 51 percent favor stricter gun control in general, that is down from 58 percent in October.
