Study: Trump Had 89% Negative Press First 3 Months of Presidency, Biden Has 59% Positive

By Jack Cowhick April 19, 2021 at 3:17pm

As if anyone needed any more evidence that the mainstream media are biased against conservatives, this study proved it.

A Media Research Center study published Monday shows a stark contrast in media coverage from the first three months of former President Donald Trump’s administration to the same timespan of President Joe Biden’s term.

According to the study, evening news broadcasts have pampered Biden with 59 percent positive coverage of his administration, while just four years ago the Trump administration received a less-than-comfortable 89 percent negative coverage.

The MRC said it “reviewed all ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage of Biden and his new administration from January 20 through April 9” — the same process it underwent in 2017 for the same study — with a total of 726 minutes of coverage.

However, it said, while this figure made up almost 20 percent of news airtime, it was “just a small fraction” of the 1,900 minutes of coverage those same programs gave to Trump and his administration in 2017.

Thankfully, the MRC has done the heavy lifting, putting together a compilation of the mainstream media’s most biased reports to date.

While the featured coverage of Biden consists of a celebration of historic moments and tales of triumph over trauma, the same cannot be said of the media’s treatment of the prior administration.

In 2017, the MRC tallied a total of 1,687 “evaluative comments” regarding the Trump administration, 89 percent of which were negative while 11 percent were positive. Now, the media has turned down the heat, with just 264 such comments being tallied on the Biden administration and over half of them positive.

Have the establishment media held the Biden administration accountable?

“These much lower numbers signify a news media that’s not trying to drown out the White House with its own aggressive criticism, as was their standard practice in 2017,” the MRC report said.

The mainstream media seemingly struggled to find a way to put a positive spin on Biden’s ongoing border crisis, with a reported 82 percent of that topic’s 115 minutes of coverage being negative.

However, this is still a massive uptick compared with the reporting on Trump’s immigration policies. Out of 120 minutes of coverage, a whopping 93 percent was negative.

On the surface, the negative coverage Biden received might seem like it proves the media are at least trying to aim for some form of impartiality. However, this is not the case. In one out of every six instances of the Biden administration being criticized, the negativity came from reporters representing a view to the left of the president, the MRC found.

Coverage of the Biden administration is also more policy-oriented now than it was four years ago under Trump, with 90 percent of airtime being dedicated to policy decisions. The Trump administration received just half of that, with 45 percent of its airtime related to policy.

Somehow, the mainstream media also avoided tackling rhetorical issues that would have sparked fury with reporters had Trump made similar comments.

When Biden essentially called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Missippi Gov. Tate Reeves and like-minded Americans “Neanderthals” for shunning mask mandates and supporting personal choice, the mainstream media spent just over a collective minute of airtime on the remark.

Biden’s false claim about Georgia’s new voting law being a modern-day version of “Jim Crow” also received a microscopic 39 seconds.

Even worse, none of that coverage was critical.

The mainstream media refuse to admit it, with CNN writing in March that “the media won’t give Biden a free ride,” but the “Big Three” — ABC, CBS and NBC — are some of the most biased news organizations in existence, essentially acting as the state propaganda arm.

The MRC ended its report with a mic-drop, writing, “Journalists like to claim they’re ‘fearless’ in confronting those in power on behalf of the public. But it’s not fearless when journalists only use their influence to harass politicians from one political party and not the other.

“That’s actually twisting journalism to suit a blatantly partisan agenda.”

It couldn’t be more right. Biden is rarely criticized regardless of how much he hurts the American people with his policies, and when he is it’s almost always because someone believes he isn’t radical enough. Thankfully, though, organizations like the MRC exist to expose this.

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