Networks ignore House crackdown on criminal aliens, obsess over ‘Morning Joe’ drama
By Edmund Kozak; LifeZette:
Major television news networks dedicated 28 times more coverage to President Donald Trump’s now infamous “Morning Joe” tweet on Thursday night than they did to the passage of “Kate’s Law” in the House of Representatives, according to a study conducted by the Media Research Center.
“In two bipartisan votes, the House passed both Kate’s Law and a measure to punish sanctuary cities,” noted MRC’s Newsbusters, “But viewers of ABC and CBS would not have known about them since they omitted it from their coverage, while NBC gave it less than 30 seconds.”
Anger and frustration over illegal immigration and illegal-immigrant crime was a driving factor in Trump’s winning the presidency. Delivering a law like Kate’s Law was one of his most well-received campaign promises. Getting the House to deliver on such a bill — with the bipartisan support of over 20 Democrats — is a significant legislative victory for the administration.
Yet ABC and CBS didn’t cover it at all, and NBC couldn’t even find a full half-minute to dedicate to covering the bill’s passage.
But for a single tweet from the president, ABC, CBS and NBC were able to dedicate a combined total of 12 minutes and 14 seconds of coverage. MRC found that ABC’s World News Tonight dedicated nearly four minutes to the tweet, while NBC spent right about three minutes on the topic. CBS spent 5 minutes and 29 seconds on the story.
MRC found that on Friday morning those same networks devoted a whopping 52 times more airtime to covering the tweet than Kate’s Law.
“Combined, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today, and CBS This Morning devoted a staggering 52 times the amount of coverage to the President’s social media attack than to Kate’s Law passing the House,” reported Newsbusters.
In total, those networks spent 24 minutes and 17 seconds on the topic of Trump’s tweets on Friday morning. Only CBS spent time covering Kate’s Law on Friday morning — and it spent only 28 seconds doing so. It did, however, spend nearly five minutes discussing Trump’s tweets.
The study comes only days following another MRC study that revealed the full extent of the mainstream media’s fixation on the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. That study found that May 17 and June 20, evening newscasts devoted 55 percent of their coverage of the President — a total of 353 minutes — to the Russia investigation.
“These statistics reinforce what we know about the liberal media’s priorities,” said Rich Noyes, Research Director for the MRC.
“They’ve never considered sanctuary cities to be especially controversial, and have covered the debate over illegal immigration as a civil rights issue, as opposed to a law and order issue,” Noyes told LifeZette. “So it’s not surprising that they would practically ignore the passage of a bill aimed at stopping this problem.”
“On the other hand, Trump’s tweet about Mika Brzezinski plays into the larger liberal narrative, which raises questions about Trump’s fitness for office and treatment of women,” observed Noyes.
“Never mind that it’s hardly ‘news’ that Donald Trump has for years posted outrageous things on Twitter — which the media have long criticized and which hasn’t seemed to affect his public support very much (if at all),” Noyes said. “The media are outraged at this jab at one of their own, and that’s reflected by the massive coverage.”
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