A newly-released study by the Media Research Center says that 88 percent of broadcast news coverage of Donald Trump and his administration during his first month in office was “hostile,” and considering an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times about gun trafficking into Mexico, the pattern is continuing.
The MRC revealed its findings at Newsbusters, and the Washington Times quickly picked up on it. According to the newspaper,
“A meticulous new study by the Media Research Center finds that 88 percent of the broadcast news coverage of Mr. Trump and his team was “hostile” during the first 30 days of office.
“The coverage was intense and plentiful. The study, which analyzed both tone and content for evening newscasts on ABC, NBC and CBS, found that the “Big Three” networks produced 16 hours of coverage on the new president and his staff. That is over half — 54 percent — of their total coverage for the month.”
In Thursday’s Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed authors Sara Kinosian and Eugenio Weigend assert that “Trump has continued to complain that Mexicans bring crime northward, while studiously ignoring the very real threat that U.S. firepower flowing in the other direction poses to Mexicans.”
While not blaming Trump for the flow of guns into Mexico, the pair are suggesting that if “the
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Trump administration actually wants to solve the problem, it needs to change laws, not just enforce them.”
Apparently Kinosian – a program officer covering arms trafficking at the Washington Office on Latin America – and Weigend – senior policy analyst for guns and crime policy at the Center for American Progress – don’t understand that the president and his cabinet do not simply “change the laws.”
What’s more, the authors seem to overlook something that happened during the Obama administration. In their article, they noted that, “From 2009 to 2014, more than 70% of firearms — nearly 74,000 — seized by Mexican authorities and then submitted for tracing by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms came from the United States.”
At least a couple of thousand guns were allowed to land in the hands of Mexican cartel killers courtesy of a BATF fiasco called “Operation Fast and Furious.” Those guns continue showing up at crime scenes, and during a congressional hearing on the disastrous operation, one BATF agent described the caper to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as “the perfect storm of idiocy.”
Reporting on the MRC study, author/analysts Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella observed, “the networks’ anchors and reporters often injected their own anti-Trump editorial tone into the coverage.”
This may be continuing today with the intense interest in conversations Attorney General Jeff Sessions had with a Russian diplomat while Sessions was still in the Senate last year. Was the press equally interested in an airport conversation Bill Clinton had with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year?
The Op-Ed authors noted in the Los Angeles Times that “If Trump is concerned about organized crime and violence in Mexico, he might want to address the United States’ role in arming it.”
A good place to start might be turning Sessions and his Justice Department loose to flesh out Fast and Furious, identify those responsible and find out who in the previous administration knew what, and when.
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