Trump's Latest Hit on the Media Was Dead On - and Here's the Proof
It’s the one truth that should be self-evident to every American, but President Donald Trump still nailed it Monday morning.
His real opponent in the November election isn’t the shell of a Democratic standard-bearer known as former Vice President Joe Biden or his Potemkin campaign.
And it isn’t the Democratic Party’s disgraceful combination of effete, opportunistic elites and brutal thugs pushing mob rule into American streets.
It’s the massive, dishonest establishment media that has spent four years plotting to make voters reconsider the rebellion of 2016, when millions of Americans decided to put a stop to the country’s seemingly relentless drift to the hopeless socialism of the “hope and change” Obama years.
.@realDonaldTrump: “My biggest opponent isn’t Biden, it’s not the Democrats. It’s the corrupt media.” pic.twitter.com/LyymanwVTg
— MRCTV (@mrctv) August 17, 2020
“My biggest opponent isn’t Biden. It’s not the Democrats. It’s the corrupt media,” Trump told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” in a telephone interview. “We have a corrupt media in this country.”
Every Republican president is fighting an uphill battle against the mainstream media, of course. They hated Richard Nixon, they loathed and feared Ronald Reagan, they despised Bush 41 and they abhorred Bush 43. But the ferocity of the media war against Trump is beyond all that — and everyone on every side of politics knows it.
A new analysis published Monday by the conservative Media Research Center proves Trump’s point – and makes it clear just how far the establishment media have gone in their propaganda war against the White House the American people elected four years ago.
Published at 8:15 EDT, it went out at virtually the same time Trump was being interviewed.
“I’ve been studying the news media and elections for more than 35 years,” wrote Richard Noyes, MRC’s research director. “Trust me — there’s never been anything like it.”
According to Noyes, MRC studied ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from June 1 through July 31 — two full months, including weekends.
The study found 512 total minutes of coverage devoted to Trump specifically, not counting coverage of the administration or its policies generally, Noyes wrote. That compared with 58 minutes devoted to Biden — a ratio of almost 9-1.
“The extra airtime devoted to Trump consisted almost entirely of anchors and reporters criticizing the President,” Noyes wrote. “During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95 percent of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five percent (34) that were positive. Using the same methodology … we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.
“Do the math, and viewers heard 150 TIMES more negative comments about Trump than Biden. That’s not news reporting — that’s a negative advertising campaign in action.”
It’s actually worse than a “negative advertising campaign.” It’s a propaganda war directed personally at the president of the United States and – by extension – the 63 million voters in the 50 states who decided he was the man to lead the country over the clearly corrupt Hillary Clinton.
This doesn’t even count the Leni Riefenstahls at CNN and MSNBC. It doesn’t include the endless column inches of anti-Trump vituperation printed in papers such as The New York Times over that same period.
It doesn’t include the rampant bias of social media giants Google, Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t include the endless snotty shots of vacuous late-night comedians who have forgotten what “funny” is supposed to mean.
Taking all that into account, it’s clear that no one who pretends to have even a shred of intellectual honesty can disagree with Trump’s point.
100% True. It is the reality that president trump and His campaign must deal with and outsmart whether they like it or not. And I Hope & Pray they will. May God Bless Him and give Him and His campaign the wisdom and perseverance to press on, keep digging, and overcome. #Trump2020
— chandra (@cghantakk) August 17, 2020
If the media would challenge Biden the way they do Trump, it would be over.
— Hailey Lauren (@LaurenHailey201) August 17, 2020
Trump deserves to win re-election. What has Joe Biden done over the last 47 years??? Is he planning on leaving his basement and answering some tough questions regarding being complicit in obtaining FISA warrants on the Trump campaign? Lets be intellectually honest
— 40YEAROLDDOCTOR (@lack_common) August 17, 2020
By himself, the doddering Joe Biden can’t excite his own basement. On its own, the increasingly leftist Democratic Party wouldn’t draw much approval from anyone who wasn’t still being declared a “dependent” on a parent’s tax return.
But with the massive power of the American “news” media, with the blaring megaphone of celebrities in the entertainment world, Biden is actually being considered capable of taking on one of the most demanding jobs in the world. (For Biden, that probably describes putting on his own shoes these days.)
“No presidential candidate — not even Barack Obama in 2008 — has ever been on the receiving end of such a wide array of media favors. (While Obama received highly positive coverage, there was no massive media effort to destroy his GOP opponent, Senator John McCain.),” Noyes wrote.
“While the former Vice President sits snugly in his basement before his nomination later this week, the entire liberal ‘news’ media complex have spent the summer on the attack against his opponent, even as they refuse to report anything negative about Biden himself.”
It’s true there might be self-serving explanations for it. Reporters, editors and executives in the mainstream media might even have convinced themselves that Trump is a danger to the republic and therefore the rules of journalism no longer apply (as New York Times media commentator Jim Rutenberg declared even before the 2016 election).
Regardless, there is literally no way to deny the essence of the president’s charge.
For Trump supporters, then, there’s more than just a sign of optimism in headlines about a poll released Sunday — by CNN, of all places – that showed the president and Biden in a statistical tie nationally, with Biden at 50 percent and Trump at 46 (the poll had a margin of error of 4 percent.)
In states considered “battlegrounds,” the poll found Biden leading by a mere 1 percent – 49-48.
Given what the country witnessed about polls and Trump’s victory in 2016, it’s a virtual certainty that his support against Biden is stronger than those numbers indicate — even in the face of a media blitzkrieg.
That’s a sign that voters are looking past the propaganda — or seeing straight through it.
That’s the one factor the media can’t control — and it’s the only one that matters.
CORRECTION, Aug. 18, 2020: This article originally stated the numerical designations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush incorrectly. President George H.W. Bush was “Bush 41.” President George W. Bush was “Bush 43.”
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