Although he’s been out of office for 126 days, the legacy media cannot stop talking about former President Donald Trump.
Even as Joe Biden’s presidency began to hit its legislative stride, the media still mentioned the name of the 45th president in about four out of every 10 news stories written about the Biden administration.
The Pew Research Center analyzed all the media coverage of President Joe Biden’s first 60 days, which ended March 21, including left-leaning, right-leaning, and “mixed audience” news outlets and found that Donald Trump cropped up in media reports across the board. Trump’s dominance of Biden’s news cycle ran from the first day until the last day of the study, Pew found.
Trump figured into 72% of all stories the first week of the Biden presidency, and as many as half of all stories for the first six weeks of the newly inaugurated Biden administration.
Even as the media focused on the COVID-19 “stimulus” bill, and Biden blasted Texas and Mississippi’s “neanderthal thinking” for lifting their mask mandates during the seventh week of his presidency, the media dragged former President Trump into 30% of all stories about his successor.
Trump’s media mentions topped 40% in each of the last two weeks of the study.
But Pew noted a certain kind of media story left Trump out of the picture: stories about COVID-19.
The media mentioned President Trump in the majority (56%) of all stories that had nothing to do with the coronavirus global pandemic, and in even more (61%) of the stories that mentioned COVID-19 “in a minor way,” according to Pew.
“But the percentage falls to 34% among stories that mentioned COVID-19 in a major way,” Pew noted.
While the media have portrayed the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines across the nation as a major success of the Biden administration, they often fail to note how President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed played a key role in allowing for the vaccine’s creation in record-breaking time.
Biden also took credit for administering 100 million vaccines to the American people, falsely claiming that unspecified members of the media had proclaimed the feat was impossible.
In fact, the United States had been on target to meet that goal before Biden ever took office.
Yet the media primarily dismiss Trump’s statements affirming his role in the nation’s groundbreaking move toward herd immunity:
- “Trump Claims Credit for Vaccines. Some of His Backers Don’t Want to Take Them,” wrote The New York Times;
- “Trump takes credit for vaccine rollout: ‘One of the greatest miracles of the ages,’” reported The Hill; and
- “Trump is desperate to get credit for the COVID-19 vaccines, but his political heartlands are reluctant to actually take them,” said a headline in Business Insider.
Late night talk show host Stephen Colbert even called Donald Trump’s claims on operation warp speed “pathetic.”
Meanwhile, the media have let Joe Biden falsely claim that “we didn’t have” a vaccine when he became president and allowed Dr. Anthony Fauci to say authorizing the vaccine was “the best decision I’ve ever made.”
The Pew study also found that the media have given Joe Biden less negative coverage than any commander-in-chief since Pew started monitoring the coverage nearly 30 years ago.
All in all, “Trump himself was mentioned in about half the stories about the new Biden administration,” the Pew study concluded. One reason may be that cable news viewership has plummeted precipitously since President Trump left office.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.
Source: Dailywire
