On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about a study finding that 96% of evening impeachment coverage at ABC, CBS, and NBC is anti-Trump. Video and partial transcript below:
So Trump says this is all total B.S., cuts to the heart of the matter. How is the mainstream media covering it? Well, here’s how CBS News is covering it … [plays clip].
And there we have it. Day one of the first public hearings, in terms of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, are now in the history books. Some devastating testimony today from two of America’s most respected diplomats who have served both Republican and Democratic presidents.
Yeah, it was devastating testimony for the Democrats. It was devastating testimony for them. But this is what they do — I told you at the top of the show. What they’re going to do is, regardless of how bad the impeachment inquiry goes and the proceedings go for Democrats — and you heard it, you heard it with your own two ears, it’s going very badly for them. But it doesn’t matter because the fancy people in suits and ties will go on television and tell you it’s all really, really bad for the president. They’ll use it to overturn the election. At the very least, because they’re not going to be able to throw him out of office, they’re going to use it to hamper him in 2020.
There is this NewsBusters analysis — Media Research Center … did a study of the network news story about ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts since 2017. What they found is that the news shows cover Trump with negative spin 96% of the time. How did they calculate that? The way they do it is they take all explicitly evaluative statements about Trump or his administration from reporters, or anchors, or non-partisan sources — so we’re not talking about when the talking heads come on, the pundits, and the commentators, and they have their own perspective, we’re talking about the people who are supposed to be objective. They then take out the partisan sources, they take out all the neutral statements and they just look at evaluative statements: 96% of them are negative, and it’s all about impeachment.
They’re dedicating more than three-fifths of all administration news coverage on the networks to this impeachment nonsense. They are also using secret sources, because if they use real sources, they would be shown to be liars. So out of 172 news reports, the strong majority of them, 59%, relied on unnamed sources for their so-called facts about impeachment. It’s B.S., it’s totally bogus and they are counting on this vagueness — on people’s eyes glossing over to put it past the American people.
Impeachment is a terrible idea. We’ve used it now four times — threatened it. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. Nobody has ever been removed from office as president through impeachment. Johnson was acquitted, Nixon resigned before he could be impeached, Bill Clinton was acquitted. Now we get to Donald Trump.
I think it’s a very good thing in this country that no president has ever been removed explicitly through the process of impeachment. What that does, what the impeachment process does, is reduces the role of the executive, which is a co-equal branch of government, and it makes it subservient to the legislature — kind of like what we have in the United Kingdom, a parliamentary style government. The Founding Fathers of this country, in their wisdom, did not give us that sort of government because that sort of government is chaotic and less representative of the American people and far more radical and far less conservative.
We need those checks and balances, and you should not be able to throw out a president just because you dislike him politically. Even if there’s evidence of some sort of crime, there is a very high threshold. You’re not going to ever impeach the president over a parking ticket or for jaywalking. It’s got to really be a political crime, it’s got to be a high crime or misdemeanor.
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