Legacy media has almost exclusively given President Donald Trump negative coverage, but the fact that it’s made no impact on his presidential win or administration points to the death of legacy media’s influence, a political commentator wrote in a recent op-ed.
According to Joe Concha, an author and contributor to Fox News and the Washington Examiner, a recent study by the Media Research Study discovered that evening newscasts on ABC, NBC, and CBS have given 92% negative and 8% positive coverage to Trump during his second term. Former President Joe Biden, conversely, received 41% negative and 59% positive coverage across all four years of his term.
Concha argued in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner that Trump’s success in office, backed up by numbers that show falling inflation, lower unemployment and gas prices, fewer border crossings, and other improvements, don’t warrant such negative coverage, pointing to a deeper issue with legacy media.
He claimed that legacy media have inherent liberal bias, adding that reporters for such outlets are intimidated by their coworkers and colleagues who will make them pay for criticisms of Democrats. However, he pointed out that the negative bias toward Trump seems to have no effect on him.
“Despite all the negative coverage Trump received throughout his third campaign for president, despite two assassinations attempts, and despite a lawfare effort resulting in 94 felony charges, he still won the popular vote and every swing state while Republicans took back the Senate and held the House,” Concha wrote. “So what does that tell us? Legacy media influence is a fraction of what it once was.”
Concha added that he doesn’t believe the legacy media will change their biased coverage during the rest of Trump’s term, resulting in lower ratings, readership, and levels of trust, which in turn will lessen their impact even more.
