President Trump recently complained, “I get 93 percent bad press,” and studies from the Media Research Center, where I work, have shown time and time again that evening news coverage on broadcast networks is about 90 percent negative month after month. How is that possible? It’s because these networks will find something negative no matter what direction the president, or the country, takes.
The motto may seem like: ‘Good news is no news.’ Or maybe it’s not the big story.
Go to the moon with the Artemis space mission. On April 1, in what may have been the most important moment in American space history since 1972, ABC’s “Good Morning America” aired seven anti-Trump reports for over fifteen minutes before finally beginning to cover space. ABC was particularly interested in arguing that Trump was out to undermine confidence in the midterm elections by rolling back the shortcomings of mail-in voting.
Later in the day, as it became clear that the Artemis launch was a success, NBC reporter Tom Costello didn’t want any flag waving for the US: “I think it’s important and relevant to take a moment and say, wow, we have to be collectively, not as Americans, not as North Americans, but just as people, proud of the achievement here — that people could have done this.”
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Then there was the daring rescue of an airman from Iranian territory, clearly very positive news. But on the Easter edition of “Sunday Morning” on CBS, they spent four minutes and four seconds on the war in Iran, but spent only 43 seconds of that on the rescued airman, or about 18% of their focus on Iran.
The rest was Pentagon reporter David Martin, who presented experts critical of Trump’s threats to damage Iranian infrastructure. First, there was former Obama aide Tess Bridgeman: “Destroy all power plants, threaten coercive action against the civilian population in an attempt to bring a government to the negotiating table. — That kind of thing is flat out illegal.” Martin also quoted former Reagan adviser Elliott Abrams and suggested that Trump’s message was completely wrong: “We want the Iranian people on our side.”
Then there was the daring rescue of an airman from Iranian territory, clearly very positive news. But on the Easter edition of “Sunday Morning” on CBS, they spent four minutes and four seconds on the war in Iran, but only spent 43 seconds of that on the rescued airman.
The coverage of Trump is so relentlessly negative that Iran’s Islamic theocracy, or what’s left of it, almost gets more positive press than the president. These networks talk about Trump’s punishment of the Iranians, but they cannot focus on the hundreds of protesters massacred by the Iranian government in the weeks before the start of the war.
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Trump’s Easter message about the Truth that threatens Iran socially, set all presenters and reporters in an uproar. ‘Open the damn Street [of Hormuz]You crazy bastards or you will live in hell,” he wrote.
The next evening, CBS White House reporter Weijia Jiang promoted the opposite view: “In an open letter, more than a hundred international law experts argue that bombing power plants amounts to potential war crimes. Trump said he is not concerned about that possibility.” He said, “I hope I don’t have to do it.” These threats are his unique method of negotiation.
The networks can easily find a hundred ‘experts’ accusing Trump of ‘war crimes’, but no ‘experts’ accusing Iran of human rights abuses.
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PBS has identified one of the open letter’s signatories, former military lawyer Rachel Van Landingham, who has written a series of vicious op-eds against Trump and Pete Hegseth on the MS NOW website. (PBS and MS NOW are indistinguishable.) She reliably trashed the president: “He threatens to make our military commit war crimes and thereby sully their honor and soul and come back with moral damage. Why? Because threatening to destroy every bridge and every single power plant in the entire state of Iran is called an indiscriminate attack. That is a war crime.” The PBS expert used the term “war crime” eleven times in her interview.
When Trump declared a ceasefire on Tuesday, the TV attention blatantly changed. Trump went from war criminal to creating “TACO Tuesday,” playing off the liberal phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.” It sounds bizarre to describe Trump ordering a series of devastating military strikes on Iran as “getting the hell out of it,” but ridicule is part of the broadcast network’s toolbox.
The CBS News streaming service brought in Financial Times commentator Robert Armstrong, who last year coined the term “TACO” to describe Trump’s method of tariff negotiations and how it is roiling the markets. He explained that he thought the acronym sounded funny and played off Trump’s “obsession” with the Mexican border. All liberals clearly agreed.
The late night comedians jumped on board. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel noted, “So today everyone, especially the people of Iran, spent all day wondering if their civilization would die tonight. Good news, it didn’t. It was the TACO Tuesday of all TACO Tuesdays. The president decided not to drop the chalupa for at least another two weeks.”
As with the ceasefire in Gaza, the networks remained negative, flagging any “chaotic” episode that showed that the ceasefire was only partial, that it was messy.
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The pattern never ends.
Trump’s network coverage was negative even in the first days after Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024.
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No matter which direction Trump takes, it’s always wrong.
Maybe that’s why the president calls it “fake news.”
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