From the moment Donald J. Trump won the Republican presidential nomination, the so-called “mainstream media” — which had treated him more as a sideshow than a serious candidate beforehand — attacked him mercilessly.

Throughout his first year in office and into his second, nothing has been off-limits or out-of-bounds for the American Pravda media. The way the press has treated Trump and his family has been nothing short of disgraceful.

But through it all, the president has battled back, labeling much of the establishment press as “fake news” (correctly, as we’ve seen time and again) while keeping campaign promise after campaign promise.

The effort is paying off — for Trump

As reported by Newsbusters, during the first four months of the year, Pravda media coverage of the president has been just as negative as it was throughout 2017, when something like 90 percent of all news stories relating to him were negative.

But while Trump’s approval ratings fell steadily last year — or so we were told — that is no longer the case. 

“In the face of massive and hostile coverage from ABC, CBS, and NBC, Trump’s job approval rating actually rose, from 37 percent in mid-December to roughly 43 percent at the end of April.”

That said, Rasmussen Reports, one of three major market polls that got Trump’s 2016 election victory right, has had the president’s approval rating touching 50 percent and even higher in recent weeks. (Related: Left-wing attacks backfiring? Trump approval hits 50 percent.)

However, the networks “are as frosty as ever,” Newsbusters noted.

Citing an analysis by the Media Research Center, which founded Newsbusters, analysts looked at 1,065 network evening news programs featuring stories about the president and top members of his administration from January-April 2018. The coverage time amounted to a staggering 1,774 minutes, or about one-third of all broadcast time.

“For comparison,” Newsbusters noted, “in 2015 and 2016, coverage of President Obama amounted to just 10 percent of all evening news airtime.”

The sited noted further:

Nearly two-fifths (39%) of the TV coverage we examined focused on Trump scandals and controversies, while 45 percent was devoted to various policy issues. The remaining airtime was spent on controversies involving other top Trump officials, such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, or did not involve specific topics.

The Russia “collusion” story was given by far the most airtime — 321 minutes, or nearly one-fifth of all Trump administration coverage. The legal battle involving porn star Stormy Daniels, as well as allegations against the President involving other women, ate up another 92 minutes of airtime.

And, of course, nearly all of the coverage was negative. Of the 598 statements at MRC analyzed during the aforementioned time frame, nearly all of them — or 579 — were negative. 

That’s around 97 percent.

The No. 1 issue, by far, in which the networks focused their negative coverage was immigration (167 minutes), followed by the economy (117 minutes), North Korea (111 minutes), Syria (89 minutes) and gun rights/gun control (57 minutes).

These times are substantial, given that nightly news broadcasts — which are supposed to focus on the most newsworthy events around a very big country (the United States) and an even bigger world — are only about 22 minutes in length, after commercials.

So a 2-3 minute lead-off piece, which happens often, knocks out a major chunk of broadcast time; if those pieces focused on Trump — which they usually did — and were negative besides, you can begin to appreciate just how much negative coverage the president has received.

But it’s not having the desired effect of making him less popular. Just the opposite, in fact.

The news media in the early 1970s, which was just as hostile to President Richard Nixon, managed to shift public opinion in favor of impeachment, giving lawmakers political cover to proceed.

There is no similar support for impeaching Trump today, despite the media’s best efforts to turn the majority of the country against him.

Read more about mainstream media groupthink at NewsCartels.com.

J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

TheNationalSentinel.com

Newsbusters.org