Watch 10 minutes of CNN (seriously, any 10 minutes), and you’ll see mostly a cavalcade of Trump bashing.
Once, there was Fox News on the right, MSNBC on the left, and CNN in the middle (mostly). There was a time, young people, when CNN covered a lot more real news in a fairly straight-forward manner.
But those days are gone, long gone. Under the lead of former NBC head Jeff Zucker, CNN has become a far-left network that harangues the right and praises the left — almost nonstop.
Want proof? The Media Research Center has done an exhaustive study on just how biased CNN has become. Read the whole report, “Study: CNN Is Completely Obsessed With Donald Trump — and Not in a Good Way,” here, but here are some of the highlights:
A “team of MRC analysts studied 20 hours, from 4 a.m. May 12 until midnight.
After excluding commercials, teases and promos, our analysts found 13 hours, 27 minutes of actual news coverage, an average of just over 40 minutes per hour. Of that, a whopping 92 percent (12 hours, 19 minutes) was devoted to the Trump presidency, with a mere 68 minutes — a little more than three minutes per hour — devoted to all of the other news of the day.
With the exception of about 21 minutes of live coverage of a White House briefing about the President’s upcoming trip to the Middle East and a smattering of coverage of Melissa McCarthy’s parody of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in an upcoming SNL appearance, CNN used that time to endlessly analyze the President’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, then a three-day-old story.
Much of that airtime consisted of interviews and panel discussions giving their assessment of Trump. MRC tallied 123 appearances by guests or panelists over the course of the day. Many of CNN’s analysts showed up in multiple newscasts, each of which would count as a separate appearance. (There were 77 unique appearances by people identified as CNN analysts or commentators, or 62% of all guests).
But here’s something more amazing: Most of CNN’s guests that day (96, or 78 percent of the total) were Trump critics. Just seven guests (6 percent) were pro-Trump, with 13 guests ruled “neutral” by MRC.
CNN’s own “journalists” were even worse. “Looking just at CNN’s own on-air talent, the results were even more tilted, with 69 appearances by anti-Trump analysts, vs. just two for pro-Trump analysts. …
The imbalance in guests was amplified by the frequent editorializing of CNN’s own hosts and anchors. During the 7am hour of New Day, host Chris Cuomo referred to clips of White House officials struggling to explain the decision to fire Comey as “the mendacity montage, because it’s just filled with lies.”
Opening his noon-hour Inside Politics, CNN host John King hyped that the “initial White House account of how and why Comey was fired lies in shambles, reduced to a heap of falsehoods.”
This review looked at just a single day, but the pattern is overwhelming: CNN is providing nearly wall-to-wall coverage of the Trump presidency, and is anything but down-the-middle in their approach.