No honeymoon for Donald Trump

In the first 30 days of his presidency, from January 20 to February 18, analysts determined that President Donald Trump and his team were the subject of 16 hours of coverage on just the Big Three evening newscasts.

That means that of all news coverage during this period, some 54 percent, focused on the newly elected US president.

The biggest controversy during his first month in office was the temporary ban on immigration from seven countries compromised by Islamic terrorism – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The three main evening newscasts spent more than 3 hours (188 minutes) on this issue, accounting for about one-fifth of all of the Trump administration’s coverage.

While most new presidents enjoy a media honeymoon, Donald Trump has not been so lucky, as almost all reports – 88 percent – were negative. During last year’s presidential campaign the coverage was even more hostile, with 91 percent of all the reports casting Trump in an unfavourable light.

Newsbusters measured the amount of evaluative statements made by reporters and non-partisan talking heads – remarks by both experts and average citizens – included in their stories. In their coverage of Trump’s first month, the networks filled their stories with quotes from citizens against Trump’s policies, while providing almost no airtime to Trump supporters.

Apart from this obvious bias, the networks’ anchors and journalists then injected their own anti-Trump editorial commentary into their coverage, on top of the already negative reporting.

A good example of current hostile journalism is Scott Pelley, CBS Evening News anchor, who snidely began his February 6 broadcast as follows: “It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality…”

NBC’s Hallie Jackson was also clearly biased on January 24 when she introduced the Nightly News with: “Instead of working to clarify or backtrack on President Trump’s false claims,” she thundered, “today his press secretary instead tried to cement them.”

Reporters only made 88 positive statements about Trump – compared to 674 negative statements.

The media is also ignoring the black suspect arrested on Friday in connection with making phone threats to Jewish community centers around the US. They had been suggesting that he might have been a “white supremacist”.

The @SecretService visited me looked at my tweets, questioned my politics b/c some awful white woman I date reported me. I won't be silenced

— Juan M. Thompson (@JuanMThompson) February 27, 2017

Juan Thompson was arrested as a suspect in the JCC phone threats but not only did his leftist political leanings not appear in the first paragraph of the ABC News online story, it didn’t appear anywhere. Thompson worked as a Raw Story editor for two weeks prior to the revelations about his previous work at The Intercept.

https://t.co/C8ssdjiGIN Skips Anti-Trump Leftist Politics of JCC Phone Threat Suspect https://t.co/nxOzttQi4T

— NewsBusters (@newsbusters) March 4, 2017

Thompson was revealed as a serial fabulist in February 2016 after The Intercept hastily added editor’s notes to five of his prior stories, including a retraction of an article that included bogus quotes attributed to a “cousin” of Dylann Roof.

That article quoted the nonexistent cousin, “Scott Roof,” who speculated Dylann had killed nine black churchgoers in South Carolina because a girlfriend had rejected him for a black man. His claims were cited in other media reports later, according to Raw Story.