Media Bias in Reporting on Trump Tariffs

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pleasure to welcome Tim Graham back to the program. NewsBusters
Executive Editor, Tim, good morning, Good morning. Nice article that
you put out on what's going on now with the
with the alphabet networks, the broadcast networks. They are bound
in determined that everything relative to Trump and any of

(00:20):
his actions and the economic news regarding him is going
to be negative. Right.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, these words and terms like Trump tariff meltdown.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, Trump, that's about the tariffs. A lot of people
were negative about the tariffs, so that made it easy
for him. But then when good news came out relative
to the broader economy, they didn't like that so much.
In fact, some of them didn't even mention it.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yes, when we had two hundred and twenty eight thousand
new jobs. Yeah, Lester Holt gave that about a sentence
in the middle of the Trump tariff meltdown story. But
one of the network I think in that case, ABC
skipped it. One of them skipped it. And then of
course we had the inflation number come out that it
was actually a decline of zero point one percent, and

(01:13):
again it got a sentence or nothing. And so these
are the things that tell you that ABC and CBS
and NBC define news as if it helps Trump, it's
not news. If it hurts Trump, it leads the news.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, I guess the thing I wonder about. Individually, they
are not nearly as big the nightly news people as
they used to be. But cumulatively, you have a lot
of people I assume, who'll be influenced by this.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Right, yes, but you know, remember the network news audience
that even the cable news audience is dominated by fifty plus.
My son just turned thirty five. He said, I don't
watch broadcast television.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Is that right at all?

Speaker 2 (02:02):
And then he said, oh, and I don't listen to
FM or AM radio.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
He doesn't know what he's missing, does he.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
He's not listening to the radio, he's just listening to
US online.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
I don't understand it at all.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
But well, you also referenced in your article Trump's first
term where there was raging positive economic news until the
COVID lockdown thing hit, and they pretty much ignored that
too until COVID and then oh boy, oh boy, the
Trump bump is over right, you know, So it's just

(02:41):
a it's an agenda. I don't know why more people
don't see this.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Well, when it's o mission. You literally didn't see it.
But yes, you know, under Trump in the first term,
they had all of these new stock market records, and
they would routinely ignore the stock market records. You know,
the employ the unemployment rate was at its lowest rate
ever measured for Blacks, Asians, Latinos, women, and young people,

(03:07):
and all of that was generally skipped.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah, you know, I don't mind take, for example, MSNBC
on the left, Fox on the right. I don't mind
their opinion shows doing this because they're labeled. Everybody knows
their opinion show. What I do object to is when
a show has a label this is a newscast, and

(03:31):
then they're guilty of this. That's a problem and it
happens all the time.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, well, this is the problem we've had is that
the the newscasts. Can you really tell the difference between
NBC News and MSNBC And they'd like to think there's
a difference, but a lot of times it just means, well,
we're MSNBC for five minutes and then we go on
to fluff.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah. Well, you know. Another thing is Tim I'm talking
with Tim Graham from NewsBusters. Another thing is the Sunday
morning shows on the on the Big three Alphabet I
call him the Alphabet networks. Their hosts. Their hosts are invariably
confrontational and adversarial with any conservative guest. And you can

(04:17):
if you watch the difference between those interviews and interviews
with Democrats, it's pretty stark. And that's advertised as a
news show too, by the way.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
You know, sometimes you can do that by just measuring
how many words does the politician get to say before
the interruption?

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yeah, I want you know, I've wanted Rosie and I've
talked about this. When they're going to stop having Tom
Cotton come on, yeah, because he just he doesn't take it.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Or Byron Donald, they just they don't handle him. Meanwhile,
they Marco Rubio, Yeah, they'll just try, you know, Chris
Christy out there and say you're a Republican and this
is the Republican side of this.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
The the breathless lack of intellect in some of the
these people is also stunning to me. It's like Jonathan
carl who is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News,
that's a pretty big gig. He says, what are we
going back to making being cobblers. He was discussing this
notion that we can't possibly bring manufacturing back to this country,

(05:17):
and if we do, then that's a real setback for
us socially and intellectually. What are we going to become
a nation of? Yeah, we are. It'd be nice if
we could make the sneakers in this country as opposed
to sweatshops in Honduras. How about that? But the left
doesn't want you to offer that because that's an inconvenient truth.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Tim, keep up to go to work. Where can folks
access that column?

Speaker 2 (05:45):
That's at foxnews dot com. I've been doing a broadcast
bias column with them, and then, of course we also
have our content atnewsbusters dot RG.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Excellent. Good to have you on. Tim Graham from NewsBusters
here on kfab's Morning News