During President Trump’s first term, the Media Research Center made a big deal out of whining that non-right-wing coverage of him was too negative. That dubious tradition continued in an April 28 post by Rich Noyes:
Just 100 days into President Donald Trump’s second term, the broadcast evening news landscape is even more lopsided than it was eight years ago, when Trump was besieged with relentlessly hostile coverage. So far this year, the new Trump administration has faced a withering 92% negative coverage from ABC, CBS and NBC, whose flagship news programs averaged more than 19.3 million viewers during the first quarter of 2025, making them the most widely-watched news programs in the country.
[…]MRC analysts tallied 1,841 explicitly evaluative statements about President Trump and his Trump administration, of which 1,698 (92.2%) were negative vs. a mere 143 (7.8%) which were positive. (Our methodology excludes partisan sources, focusing on statements from reporters, anchors and nonpartisan sources. More below.)
Eight years ago, using the identical methodology, we found Trump was blasted with 89% negative coverage at the hands of these networks during the first weeks of his first term.
Ah, but the methodology is the problem. As we pointed out during those first-term evaluations, the MRC makes these critical failures that discredit its work:
- It focuses only on a tiny sliver of news — the evening newscasts on the three networks — and suggests it’s indicative of all media — the headline declares it evaluates “TV News” but says nothing about how Fox News covered Trump.
- It pretends there was never any neutral coverage of Trump. Indeed, the study explicitly rejects neutral coverage — even though that’s arguable the bulk of news coverage — dishonestly counting “only explicitly evaluative statements.”
- It fails to take into account the stories themselves and whether negative coverage is deserved or admit that negative coverage is the most accurate way to cover a given story.
- It fails to provide the raw data or a complete list of the actual statements it evaluated so its work could be evaluated by others. If the MRC’s work was genuine and rigorous, wouldn’t it be happy to provide the data to back it up?
Noyes went on to huff that coverage of the Department of Government Efficiency was 97 percent negative — again, failing to examine whether the negative coverage is justified or accurate — and euphemistically redefining DOGE as “Elon Musk’s tech-savvy approach to reducing government staffing and spending.”
Noyes went on to cheer that his employer’s decades-long war against non-right-wing media is having an effect:
Earlier this year, Gallup reported that most Americans have essentially lost trust of the media: “When Gallup began tracking Americans’ views of the news media in the early 1970s, attitudes were overwhelmingly positive, but public confidence in the Fourth Estate has collapsed over the past three decades.”
One reason for that loss of trust may be that three of the most widely-watched news programs in the nation present viewers with a preposterously lopsided view of politics that leaves no room for fair debate and discussion.
Noyes can’t be bothered to find “fair debate and discussion” in right-wing media.
The next day, an anonymously written post touted:
On Tuesday, MRC senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino joined Steve Bannon and Eric Bolling on Real America’s Voice to discuss the latest NewsBusters study of the broadcast Trump coverage. D’Agostino slammed the corporate media for attempting to “pull the wool over Americans’ eyes, as they aid Democrats in flooding the border and hollowing out the economy.”
No mention, of course, how Bannon is a right-wing extremist or that Bolling lost his job at Fox News after claims of sexual harassment were made against him., and no explanation was offered for while the MRC allowed D’Agostino to go on such an extremist show. Indeed, D’Agostino played along with Bannon in demonizing the media with the inflammatory term “enemies of the people”:
Bannon recalled the standing ovation that MSNBC host Eugene Daniels had received at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for insisting that the press were not the enemy of the people. “Would you say, in fact, by their actions, not their words, they are the enemies of the people?” Bannon inquired.
D’Agostino agreed: “Yeah, absolutely. This coverage that we’re talking about here is just negativity on Trump, right? And some of his policies. But if you look at the way they actually handle Americans, it’s the exact same thing.”
Tim Graham dutifully promoted the study during his April 30 podcast:
Keep in mind that the amount of Trump coverage — 899 stories making up 1,716 minutes — translates into more voluminous negative coverage. Biden drew only 726 minutes in 2021. Trump has granted much broader access to the press — and it looks like he has been punished for it. Biden did not suffer for hiding away from the press.
There is the same contrast in the 2017 study — Trump drew 1,900 minutes of coverage, and 89 percent of it was negative. Remember that all the politician statements are excluded from the count, so it focuses on the more “objective” or “independent” sources like reporters, their experts, and average citizens.
Trump’s most dramatic success — securing the border — barely moved the needle.
Graham whined that “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received a unanimous 100% bad press from the networks” but wouldn’t explain why that is — there was no mention of his general incompetence as exemplified by the scandal of him using an unencrypted Signal chat to discuss military plan, which the MRC tried its best to distract from.