Tag: network news
Former President Donald Trump

Normalizing Trump, Network News Shows Ignore His Dictatorial 'Immunity' Claim

Donald Trump on January 18 gave political reporters plenty to talk about: threats of “bedlam” if the Supreme Court doesn’t overrule state decisions and place his name on state ballots and a claim that “total immunity” gave him free rein to subvert the results of the 2020 election. All three major broadcast outlets’ evening news shows failed to cover these incendiary remarks.

In a legal brief filed to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 18, Trump attorneys implored justices to keep Trump’s name on state ballots for the 2024 presidential election, writing that disqualifying Trump “promise[s] to unleash chaos and bedlam.” The court is scheduled to hear oral arguments regarding Colorado’s removal of Trump from its primary and general election ballots beginning February 8. Trump himself echoed the language in the brief while speaking to reporters: “It’ll be bedlam in the country. … It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box."

Earlier that day, in an all-caps post on Truth Social, Trump railed against the federal prosecutions related to his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection. “A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY,” Trump wrote. “EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD.”

Even Trump’s right-wing media sycophants have disputed his outlandish claims of “total immunity” in the past.

Instead of covering Trump’s unhinged social media rant or his threats of “bedlam,” evening network news broadcasts took a business-as-usual approach. Election segments framed the upcoming New Hampshire primary as a two-person horse race between Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, with NBC Nightly Newsdiscussing “how the crisis at the border is impacting the race." NBC also chose to include a Truth Social post from Trump urging Republicans not to compromise on a border security deal but failed to mention his post arguing the law doesn’t apply to him as president. This editorial decision is particularly baffling since NBC News was the only broadcast outlet that covered Trump’s “total immunity” claim on its website.

Meanwhile, ABC World News Tonight aired a segment on the New Hampshire primary that mostly focused on Haley and Trump accusing each other of being bigger drags on the Republican ticket. The program also aired a report on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ alleged misconduct regarding a relationship with a special prosecutor working on Trump’s election interference case, followed by a brief mention of Hunter Biden’s upcoming deposition. Indeed, all three networks favored mentioning Hunter Biden’s legal woes instead of Trump’s threatening and undemocratic claims.

CBS Evening News also had a banal segment on the New Hampshire primary, and rounded out its coverage with a two-minute story about the world’s largest cruise ship, effectively a commercial.

Failing to report on Trump’s threats and incendiary remarks – effectively sanitizing Trump for a mass audience – is exactly the sort of coverage decision that spurred Media Matters to name legacy media our Misinformer of the Year for 2023. If these major news outlets continue this trend, we’re in store for a repeat of 2016.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Biden Boom Hits New Heights, As Press Buries The Good News

Biden Boom Hits New Heights, As Press Buries The Good News

When the Commerce Department on Thursday announced that the economy just grew at the fastest rate in nearly 40 years, posting robust growth numbers not seen since the Reagan era, none of the network newscasts treated the announcement as a big deal. In fact, two of the three newscasts, “ABC World News Tonight” and “CBS Evening News” didn’t even cover the story on Thursday — “NBC Nightly News” gave it one sentence.

The same media that remains in inflation hyperventilation mode, just cannot work up the energy to consistently inform news consumers about the red-hot economy under President Joe Biden. It won’t billboard the fact that it grew so rapidly in the fourth quarter of last year that it pushed the annual gross domestic product rate — the broadest measure of economic activity — to an eye-popping 5.7 percent. (The GDP under Trump never got above 3 percent.) Consumer spending also soared 7.9 percent last year, the quickest clip in since 1946.

So attached to the idea of using economic news to bash Biden, the press doesn’t know what to do when the data demolish the media’s preferred storyline. That was obvious by the fact that the coverage of the blockbuster GDP news seemed to go out of its way not to mention him.

In its GDP news piece, the New York Times made no reference to Biden or that the soaring economic data were a boost for the administration. But when the Times covers jobs reports and inflation updates it makes sure to emphasize, prominently in the coverage, that that news is bad for Biden. In its reporting on the jump in the December inflation rate, the newspaper mentioned Biden in the very first sentence, referencing, “a troubling development for President Biden and economic policymakers.”

This trend is quite common. The Associated Press in its reporting on high inflation in December also mentioned Biden in the first sentence, while its recent report on GDP figures didn’t mention him until the tenth paragraph, and made no suggestion that the figures represented a win for the White House.

Then there were the news outlets that acknowledged the GDP numbers were good news, but stressed that bad news was likely around the corner. “Economy Caps Strong Year as Worries Lurk,” was the Wall Street Journal page-one print headline. CNN rushed in with similar, glass-half-empty analysis: “The Economy Boomed in Biden's First Year. His Second Will Be Harder.”

The CNN spin was especially remarkable because the network spent the second half of last year burying Biden with doomsday economic coverage, especially regarding inflation, which was deemed a “political nightmare for Biden.” (Remember CNN’s wacky report about gallons of milk?) Then when GDP numbers confirmed that the economy had been on fire last year, CNN begrudgingly acknowledged the fact (“the economy boomed”), then quickly insisted Biden faces economic trouble in 2022.

Heads, Biden loses. Tails, Biden loses.

That media drumbeat of negativity, cheered on by the GOP, has taken its toll. Recently asked in a YouGov poll if they had “heard mostly positive or mostly negative news stories about the economy,” 48 percent of Americans said “mostly negative,” and just 8 percent said “mostly positive.” (28 percent said both negative/positive, and 16 percent said they hadn’t heard much about the economy at all.) Those results came in the wake of a media study that showed Biden was getting worse coverage late last year then Trump did in late 2020.

Note that the same day the GDP announcement was made, a National Public Radio reporter was on Twitter asking listeners to share their stories of economic gloom: “Has your 2021 raise been wiped out by #inflation? Has your 401k taken such a steep dive you're rethinking retirement? The @nprbusiness desk wants to hear from you.” The plea raised the obvious question: Why does NPR only want to hear bad news about the economy?

Another key fact about the coverage: The GDP for 2021 obliterated expectations that had been set by economists during the run-up to the announcement. Yet still the press shrugged. That’s telling because when it comes to reporting on monthly jobs reports, the press bases its coverage entirely around the same type of expectations. When 199,000 new jobs were added in December, the press treated that as bad news (“faltering,” “a major disappointment”) because the key number failed to beat expectations.

Last year, NPR announced the 210,000-jobs report for November was a “bust” even though the unemployment rate tumbled from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent in just 30 days. By contrast, back in January of 2020, NPR cheered that the U.S. economy under Trump was “revved up” because 225,000 jobs had been created. That jobs report was good news because it beat expectations.

So why wasn’t the estimate-beating GDP news treated as a huge deal? NPR, which has been committed to doomsday economic coverage under Biden, tried to downplay the news, suggesting that “believe it or not” the economy grew last year.

For NPR, good economic news under Biden is treated as a mirage.

Reprinted with permission from PressRun

Ed Joyce, Former CBS News President Who Tangled With Dan Rather, Dies At 81

Ed Joyce, Former CBS News President Who Tangled With Dan Rather, Dies At 81

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times

Ed Joyce, a former president of CBS News whose brief, turbulent tenure in the 1980s was marked by threatened corporate takeovers and settlement of a damaging libel lawsuit from Gen. William Westmoreland, has died. He was 81.

His death Saturday at his home in Redding, Conn., was confirmed by his son Randall Joyce, a producer with CBS News.

Ed Joyce, who retired at 55 and spent most of the years since as a horseman and civic leader in California’s Santa Ynez Valley, died as a result of throat cancer, his son said.

Joyce was the storied news operation’s president from 1983 until he was squeezed out in 1986.

The immediate cause of his departure, he said in his 561-page, 1988 memoir “Prime Times, Bad Times,” was his long-running conflict with newsman Dan Rather. Joyce had criticized Rather’s high salary, his mercurial personality, his stiff news delivery, and his agent, whom he called a “flesh-peddler.”

Shortly before Joyce was fired from the news division’s top job, his boss Gene Jankowski, head of the CBS Broadcast Group, gave him a signal of his imminent demise.

“There are lots of presidents,” Joyce quoted Jankowski as telling him. “There’s only one Dan Rather.”

Joyce rose to the top amid problems that have since become endemic to the news business.

With shareholders demanding more profits from news operations, Joyce instituted layoffs on an unprecedented scale in his division. Some of the 74 employees who were fired were given only 48 hours to clear out — a gaffe Joyce later explained by saying that he wanted to disrupt news gathering as little as possible.

Joyce also had to contend with pressures to craft stories defined by a single compelling moment.

Van Gordon Sauter, a former CBS News president who was promoted to a higher executive position, was a forceful advocate for an emotional connection with viewers — a philosophy that Joyce described as “the kind of articulate drivel we had often listened to, admired, and then ignored.”

But Joyce did not always resist the force of fluff. In his book, he acknowledged that it was a mistake to hire Phyllis George, a former Miss America, as co-anchor of “The CBS Morning News” in 1984.

George once announced her desire to do a news-making interview with “that Gandhi woman,” according to Joyce.

When she was told that Indira Gandhi, the former prime minister of India, had been assassinated months earlier, George responded: “Oh … well, somebody like her.”

In 1985, CBS News and Westmoreland settled the lawsuit brought by the general after a 1982 documentary accused him of manipulating figures to deceive the American public about progress in the Vietnam War.

“The trial convinced the Far Right that CBS was the Great Satan,” Joyce wrote.

Questions about news ethics even prompted a suggestion from Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), that fellow conservatives buy CBS stock to change the direction of its news coverage.

The idea fizzled, but CBS did have to fend off Ted Turner, Ivan Boesky, and others. Billionaire Laurence Tisch was credited with saving CBS from a hostile takeover in 1986 but was later criticized for layoffs that were larger than those imposed by Joyce.

Born in Phoenix on Dec. 13, 1932, Edward Matthew Joyce grew up in various spots around the United States, following his jack-of-all-trades father from job to job. Joyce said he attended about 20 schools in 10 years.

His father gave him his first taste of the media business. During the Depression, the elder Joyce worked as a wrangler on a dude ranch and put out a tourist magazine called “The Last Frontier.”
Faced with sagging circulation, he sometimes bartered stacks of magazines for Indian jewelry at desert trading posts.

Graduating from high school in Manhattan, Joyce attended the University of Wyoming, dropping out after his wife, Maureen, became pregnant. He worked at radio stations in Cody, Wyo., Utica, N.Y., and Schenectady, N.Y., before landing a jazz show at WCBS in New York.

After he left CBS, Joyce and his wife settled in Santa Ynez and, later, Buellton, Calif. He became president of a local Rotary Club and was active in the Santa Ynez Historical Society. A team penner at rodeos, he was a member of various equestrian groups.

“I’m living proof that it’s never too late to have a childhood,” he told Variety in 1994.

The couple moved to Connecticut, their previous home, in 2007.

In addition to his wife, son Randall and daughter Brenda Hauser, Joyce is survived by five grandchildren.

Photo: Los Angeles Times/MCT

Interested in national news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!