On the Thursday edition of WMAL’s O’Connor & Company, Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell laid waste to ABC, CBS, and NBC for their “completely biased coverage of Donald Trump” as revealed by our latest study of the sham trial by Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg interfering in the 2024 election.
Speaking to co-hosts Larry O’Connor and Mercedes Sclapp, Bozell said “the networks have no right to steal elections this way” with a mammoth 640 minutes since jury selection began and rank bias by omission with only three minutes during their evening shows on Michael Cohen’s perjury conviction and zero seconds on Judge Juan Merchan’s liberal ties.
Most significantly, Bozell implored listeners at the end of the interview to remember these “broadcast airwaves are owned by the American people” and with this “deliberate attempt to interfere with the election” by “deliberately” withholding key facts about the trial, “it’s high time for Congress to hold hearings” because they “have no right to steal elections”.
Earlier in the interview, he conceded the trial’s significance is “so serious that you should expect the networks to treat it seriously” and while “I’ll agree with you completely” that the 640 minutes wasn’t surprising, but a “look inside that coverage” reveals a murderer’s row of bias.
After asking a rhetorical question of how the networks would react if Barack Obama were charged with the same crimes by a white prosecutor in Mississippi, he outlined the scant mentions of Cohen’s criminal record, which he argued is “[t]he whole key to the Trump defense”:
With D.A. Alvin Bragg, who’s a Democrat who’s prosecuting Donald Trump, out of — get this number — out of 110 evening news stories, only three hinted that he was a Democrat. On NBC Nightly News, there were exactly two references. On ABC, they let it slip once — and that was Donald Trump quoting it. And CBS once never mentioned it once on the trial. It gets even better than that. What about Michael Cohen? The whole key to the Trump defense is that he is a serial liar and a convicted perjurer. Nearly one third of the coverage discussed Michael Cohen and yet, guess how many times they mentioned his conviction for perjury? Three minutes....The key to Donald Trump’s defense was given three minutes out of 640 minutes.
Bozell also brought up the lack of mentions for Merchan’s conflicts of interest (including his donations to President Biden and an anti-Republican group) as well as how “[o]n average, more than one time every [evening] story, they’ve said that [Trump’s] a criminal.”
Upon being told ABC was the worst, O’Connor proclaimed: “Yeah, the house that George Stephanopoulos built is the worst. Absolutely.”
Before closing with a screed against the networks for poisoning the electorate, Bozell pointed out these coverage tallies have real-world impacts with an NBC poll giving Biden “a landslide of 55 percent to 35 percent” over Trump in November among “people who say they primarily get their information from national network news”.
