At the 100-day mark in President Trump’s second term, it’s apparent once again that the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC are organized to cover Trump as negatively as possible. A new NewsBusters study finds coverage of Trump has been 92 percent negative. Four years ago, Biden coverage was 59 percent positive. Rich Noyes explains the difference.
Keep in mind that the amount of Trump coverage — 899 stories making up 1,716 minutes — translates into more voluminous negative coverage. Biden drew only 726 minutes in 2021. Trump has granted much broader access to the press — and it looks like he has been punished for it. Biden did not suffer for hiding away from the press.
There is the same contrast in the 2017 study — Trump drew 1,900 minutes of coverage, and 89 percent of it was negative. Remember that all the politician statements are excluded from the count, so it focuses on the more “objective” or “independent” sources like reporters, their experts, and average citizens.
Trump’s most dramatic success — securing the border — barely moved the needle. Out of nearly four hours (233 minutes) of evening news airtime devoted to immigration, these newscasts spent just 3.5 minutes letting viewers know just how much Trump has reduced border crossings. “What was once a record influx, now a trickle,” NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez acknowledged on the February 7 Nightly News.
Trump’s coverage was 92.2 percent negative, but his aides were also covered hypernegatively: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced 89% negative press, DOGE architect Elon Musk was slammed with 96% negative coverage, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received a unanimous 100% bad press from the networks. This is only during Trump’s presidency, not in the contentious preliminaries before the inauguration.
Musk drew a flood of negative soundbites from federal workers who had been laid off or were in fear of layoffs. “I thought, well, they’re going to take a scalpel to fraud, waste and abuse, not just hack off the entire limb,” a laid-off FEMA worker told NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez on March 10. Just one federal employee said something pro-DOGE.
Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
