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STUDY: CNN’s Unhealthy Obsession With Trump

STUDY: CNN’s Unhealthy Obsession With Trump

It’s almost like there’s an agenda…

The most egregious part of the Trump administration is the media’s coverage of the Trump administration.

Dating back to campaign season Trump, political media disproportionately focused on Trump’s every coming, going, meal, and insignificant oddity. Not much has changed post-election.

A study recently conducted by the Media Research Center found CNN, the supposed middle of the road network in cable newsdom, devoted 92% of its coverage last Friday to President Trump.

To get a handle on CNN’s news priorities during the Trump era, a team of MRC analysts reviewed all of the cable network’s programming on Friday, May 12, starting with the 4am ET Early Start and continuing through the 11pm ET CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, a total of 20 hours of material.

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.

Naturally, an overwhelming number of the analysts brought on to discuss Trump were not fans of the President.

As MRC found:

The obvious tilt didn’t end with non-CNN paid analysts. The network’s own on-air talent was more skewed in their analysis:

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 — CNN political commentator Paris Dennard, who appeared during the latter half of the 3:00pm ET hour, and CNN political commentator Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign aide, who appeared in the 8pm ET hour of Anderson Cooper 360.

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.”

It’s almost like there’s an agenda…

Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye

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Comments

What’s a “CNN”?

    – it’s the “Clinton News Network.”

    It worked out well for them when it was Bill’s network but no so good when they put their future in the hands of that incompetent, corrupt old crow hillary.

    They can go to group therapy with that other idiot barack, who also was dumb enough to bet the farm on hillary clinton.

    Gotta love it.

They take their role as partisan enemy quite seriously. Always have, but they’ve redoubled their efforts since Trump called them out on it.

healthguyfsu | May 17, 2017 at 1:21 pm

Doubling down is not for amateurs…only true zealots

It’s the same pattern for CNN, but instead of the usual monotony about some missing coed during Spring break or extraterrestrials hiding a missing jetliner, it’s Trump living rent-free in this network’s hive mind.

Cut the cable and life dramatically improves.

Yesterday Blitzer asked whether it was time for “we” to impeach Trump.

ronlankford | May 17, 2017 at 1:50 pm

Some people would kill for that kind of coverage, but @POTUS still gets it for free. Gotta love him for that. Even though the MSM is mostly negatively biased, I question the usefulness of analyzing one single day of coverage, especially without comparison with any other networks. What was FNC doing that day?

Well, to be fair, Trump is news, and therefore a suitable topic for coverage.

Better him than, say, the usual nonstop saturation bombing about the daily goings-on of prominent transsexuals.

I almost can’t watch Fox News anymore, either, as they’ve got so many lefties on the staff. Shep Smith would be a swell addition to CNN and the rest of the screaming Democrat talking point channels.

Since day -100. They would like to carry out a baby trail. Failing that, they would to impeach him. Either way, there is a Planned cannibalization of his administration.

Good thing he’s not a missing aircraft over the Indian Ocean, then there would be nonstop coverage!