Donald Trump has become the biggest thing for TV since the O.J. Simpson trial, with networks coughing up over 11 hours of coverage to his blustering presidential campaign, about five times more than his top challenger, Texas Sen Ted Cruz.
A report from the Media Research Center said:
“As of Friday, Trump’s seven-month-old candidacy has been the focus of an incredible 684 minutes of coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts, far more than any of his GOP rivals — more than four times as much as the next-most-covered candidate, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (151 minutes), and more than five times as much as Texas Senator Ted Cruz (122 minutes), currently Trump’s leading rival in the polls.”
Missing in all that coverage: Reports on Trump’s past as a liberal Democrat and the left policies he pushed and endorsed, said MRC.
“While the big broadcast networks have devoted a tremendous amount of airtime to controversies involving the GOP frontrunner, they’ve spent surprisingly little time on one aspect of Trump’s biography that would seem especially important to voters in a conservative primary: the businessman’s past record of support for liberal positions and liberal politicians,” said MRC.
They provided a chart, for example, that showed that his past liberalism wasn’t in the top 10 most-covered Trump controversies.
“The networks have spent only about nine minutes (1.3 percent of Trump’s overall coverage) discussing the candidate’s clearly documented past support for liberal policy positions (i.e., pro-abortion, single-payer health care) and his praise of leading Democrats, including Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton,” said the report from MRC’s Rich Noyes.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
