(NewsInsights.org) – On May 30, the jury handed down a guilty verdict on all 34 counts in former President Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial, angering many Conservatives. The Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative media outlet combatting falsehoods and censorship in the news, published a report detailing how the mainstream press approached trial coverage.
Rich Noyes, a contributing editor and former MRC research director, and Curtis Houck, managing editor of the NewsBusters blog, co-wrote an editorial post. They pointed out that regardless of the outcome, mainstream media outlets like ABC, CBS, and NBC utilized the intentionally inflammatory coverage as a six-week negative ad campaign against Trump, constituting election interference because the programming targets the presumptive Republican nominee.
The MRC studied network news stories collected over the six weeks from the trial’s beginning to end. The broadcasts represented 640 minutes, or more than 10.5 hours, of coverage about the case collected from Sunday news discussion shows, evening news segments, and weekday morning news shows.
At 257 minutes, ABC had 40% of the total coverage. NBC garnered nearly 35% with 222 minutes, and CBS provided 161 minutes of content or about 25% of the total that MRC studied.
Inversely, Noyes and Houck reported that networks aired less than eight minutes of coverage about Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez’s trial for bribery.
Additionally, the MRC report discussed several issues with how the networks presented their coverage. For example, of the 110 evening news broadcasts, representing 244 minutes of the total, only three ever referred to District Attorney Alvin Bragg as a Democrat. The editors also chastised the networks for mostly failing to mention the perjury conviction of key witness and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.
Houck and Noyes also questioned the networks’ presumption of innocence, noting that they collectively used the term “criminal” at least 111 times referring to Trump and the trial.
Moreover, the pair noted that the mainstream media often sensationalized irrelevant, sleazy testimony while burying many pertinent facts. They said the networks “amplif[ied] the worst allegations against the former President” for six weeks while he remained limited in his ability to counter them by campaigning freely.
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