
On the ‘news’…




During CNN’s coverage of the 2020 Republican National Convention on Monday, CNN host Chris Cuomo stated that protesting and church attendance have “nothing to do” with each other and protests are “people who are responding in this country to outrageous acts of social injustice. To say, well, it’s the same as going to church, no, it isn’t.” And that “you would have chaos” if you told people you couldn’t protest.

Under the best of circumstances, reporting on COVID-19 is tough. There are simply too many unknowns, and even when officials aren’t manipulating the truth they aren’t always willing to cop to the fact that they really don’t have solid answers.
But there’s really no excuse for journalism as sloppy and misleading as the August 13 ABC News segment whose headline blared “US reports highest single-day of COVID-19 deaths.” This video was widely shared, appearing not just on the main ABC News site, but also on Good Morning America, MSN.com, and elsewhere. And it simply wasn’t true.

As every press conference indicates, the mainstream media and President Trump have a rancorous relationship, but how deep does the press’ antipathy go? A recent study says lopsided coverage of the two presidential candidates is pervasive among all major media outlets.
According to the conservative Media Research Center, which tracks media bias, evening newscasts, which are some of the highest-rated programs on television today, have given President Trump 150 times more negative coverage than Joe Biden throughout this presidential campaign so far.
“From June 1 through July 31, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts focused 512 minutes of airtime on the President, or nine times more than the 58 minutes allotted to Biden,” reported Newsbusters. “This is an even wider gap than the spring when Trump received seven times more coverage than Biden (523 minutes vs. 75 minutes).”
“During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the President, 95% of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five% (34) that were positive,” the report continued. “Using the same methodology (fully described at the end of this article), we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive.”
In those same two months, virtually every negative story about Biden — from Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations to his sharp leftward shift, to his apparent racial gaffes — was all swept under the rug or dramatically under-reported, even as the newscasts continued to negatively cover President Trump. The former vice president’s own policy platform, which includes massive expansions of government health care, education, and environmental programs, received just “a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime, not one second of which included any critical analysis from any journalist.”


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