Beforfe the 2024 election, the Media Research Center rooted against America by talking down the economy under President Biden in the hope that a Republican would win the White House. Now that Donald Trump has become president, the MRC is hypocritically accusing others of what it did under Biden. Nicholas Fondacaro groused in a March 12 post:
After telling the American people not to worry about the economy during the 2024 presidential election out of political convenience, the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View had suddenly found reason to fret as they pushed the notion that President Trump was bringing about a recession. They betrayed their motivations with a conversation about how media narratives play a role in manipulating the public’s perception and possibly triggering recessions.
“Let me ask you this, because we did mention a possibility of a recession,” co-host Sunny Hostin asked of ABC News chief business, tech, and economic correspondent Rebecca Jarvis. “[E]xperts across the board have put the likelihood as high as 50 percent. What’s your take on that based on the data? Should Americans start planning, start bracing for a potential recession?”
Jarvis responded by claiming a recession was “an increasing probability, and the probability increases the longer the uncertainty remains.”
[…]The question then becomes: if doom and gloom media reporting could trigger a recession, how about the absent of it? Or, can a concerted effort by the media to claim there wasn’t a recession on the horizon, or perhaps one actively happening, stave one off?
Back in 2022, economic growth shrank for two consecutive quarters, the exact definition of a recession, but the media refused to use the term. And as NewsBusters reported at the time, The View tried to downplay the recession and argued that climate change was more important that the peoples’ economic pain.
We don’t recall Fondacaro or anyone else at the MRC lamenting “doom and gloom” economic reporting when the president was a Democrat. As we’ve noted, two consecutive quarters of non-growth is not the only definition of a recession, and the MRC kept up the negativity even after GDP turned positive.
Jorge Bonilla hit the same talking points in a March 14 post under the screaming headline “RECESSION PORN”:
ABC World News Tonight opened their newscast by stoking recession fears among their viewership. This, just one day after being the only network evening newscast not to report on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a key indicator for inflation, coming in below expectations.
[…]They made it bleed so it could lead. Muir’s overwrought opening that could’ve served as its own brief is the tell that ABC relished in packaging and delivering this story the way they did.
It bears noting that there isn’t even a negative GDP quarter on the books yet. It is also important to note that when the Biden administration reported two negative quarters, the media totally ignored it, which bought the administration enough time to change the definition of “recession”. One imagines that the media will revert to the classical definition of “recession” should two consecutive negative quarters happen under Trump.
Bonilla was silent on his employer’s recession porn under Biden. P.J. Gladnick did something similar in an April 12 post:
Remind us again about who was president in March? You wouldn’t know if you only depended on the CNN News Central report on the very unexpected DROP in the rate of inflation in March that was presented by reporter Matt Egan. Despite all his gushing about the drop in the inflation rate, Egan couldn’t bring himself to mention the T-name. Oh, and the other name missing from Egan’s report was Joe Biden despite having presided over monthly increases in the inflation rate throughout his time in the White House from 2021 through January 20, 2025.
Watch Egan present the very good news on the inflation front without ever mentioning You-Know-Who.
[…]At least CNN, unlike much of the media which was reluctant to even report on the good economic news, did give us the inflation details but somehow absurdly neglected to mention the main reason why (change in administrations) the sudden change in inflation rate.
Gladnick didn’t mention that the same change in administrations changed his employer’s talk about the economy.
Bill D’Agostino stayed on message in an April 15 post:
Over the past two weeks, broadcast networks were utterly consumed by news of the Trump administration’s tariffs, to the degree that the topic took up more than a third of their flagship morning and evening newscasts’ total run time. Yet during that same time period, these networks spared barely any time at all to cover some of the positive economic news, such as the declining Consumer Price Index and a stronger-than-expected jobs report.
MRC analysts looked at all coverage of tariffs on ABC, CBS, and NBC’s flagship morning and evening news shows, from April 2 through April 11. During that time, these networks aired a jaw-dropping seven hours and two minutes of reporting about the Trump administration’s trade war, and all three surpassing two hours each. ABC led the pack with 148 minutes, followed by NBC with 144 minutes and CBS with 130 minutes dedicated to the topic.
But apparently these networks’ fevered interest in the economy did not extent to the March jobs report, which indicated the U.S. economy “added far more jobs than expected” in March. ABC and NBC gave it only a passing mention on the evening of April 4 (14 seconds on ABC, and just 11 on NBC). CBS, which skipped the report entirely that night, spent a scant 20 seconds on it the following morning. All told, the combined coverage across all three networks topped out at a pitiful 45 seconds.
Meanwhile, during that same period (the evening of April 4 through the evening of April 5), the broadcast networks gave tariffs a whopping 62 times more coverage than the jobs report, amounting to 46 minutes and 50 seconds of air time. ABC again topped the list (17 minutes and 53 seconds), followed by NBC (16 minutes and 50 seconds) and CBS (12 minutes and seven seconds).
[…]Recession talk also ramped up on the broadcast airwaves over the past two weeks. From April 2 through April 11, the term was brought up a combined 74 times on all three networks. Even when economists began airing more optimistic sentiment about the odds of a recession after the Trump administration eased up on its tariffs late last week, the doom and gloom continued apace on broadcast networks.
Like his co-workers, D’Agostino didn’t mention how his employer continually talked down the economy pre-Trump.
Joseph Vazquez grumbled in an April 23 post:
President Donald Trump’s first 100 days haven’t even been completed yet and CNN is already whipping out “Great Depression” scare porn to describe the current stock market under his administration. No, you didn’t misread that.
“We’re suddenly talking about the Great Depression when discussing Trump’s stock market,” read the insane April 22 headline of CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman’s latest anti-Trump flapdoodle. “Trump’s stock market is throwing off some jaw-dropping statistics. How extraordinary? We’re now making comparisons to the Great Depression,” he continued.
[…]Goldman’s pathetic stock market agitprop is the end result of what happens when a journalist willfully gulps down every blue pill the Biden regime gave them like a sucker and gets turned into a mindless propaganda bot that spits out whatever anti-Trump talking points are downloaded into their prefrontal cortex.
Again, the MRC’s doomsaying under Biden was not mentioned. Vazquez returned for a May 16 post in which a non-right-wing outlet spouted his preferred talking points:
The typical suspects in the leftist media ether have been spitting out Armageddon-level economic scareporn about President Donald Trump’s trade war like clockwork. But Axios is now admitting that may have all been just pathetic attempts to get people to jump at shadows that aren’t attached to anything.
“Hard data suggests tariff-driven inflation and recession fears may be overblown,” read the eye-opening May 15 headline by Axios economics reporter Courtney Brown. “With major indicators from April — the month of peak tariff uncertainty — now in, none show the kinds of recessionary or inflationary conditions implied by business and consumer surveys,” Brown reported.
Go figure.
And, no, he didn’t mention how his employer pushed economic doomsaying under Biden even when the economy was improving. Go figure.
Vazquez did something similar in a July 11 post:
The Washington Post is finding it impossible to admit that all the media scareporn about the Trump economy turned out to be less realistic than B-movies without still making it seem like disaster is just around the corner.
Post reporter Rachel Lerman published a pretty shocking July 5 story conceding what anyone with sense could see. “Trump’s economy remains pretty strong,” read Lerman’s headline in part, before she inserted the typical spin into the rest of it, “but some warning signs are flashing.”
Her lede paragraph read like disappointment that Trump’s policies on trade and immigration haven’t yielded the economic catastrophe the anti-Trump media doom mongers have been bleating about. President Donald Trump “has imposed global tariffs, orchestrated a crackdown on immigration and pushed a sweeping tax-cut bill through Congress — moves that could significantly alter the U.S. economy, but haven’t yet.” Oh boo-hoo.
[…]Never mind the fact that the economy has repeatedly defied expectations that Trump’s tariffs would wreck the economy in a New York minute.
The economy defied right-wing expectations under Biden, but the MRC has never apologized for pushing that distorted narrative.