By Nate Jackson

Media Research Center released its latest report revealing that coverage of President Donald Trump on network nightly newscasts — watched by 23 million people — was 90% negative in 2018. That matches historically bad coverage in 2017, and it aligns with similar studies by organizations like Pew Research Center and Harvard University, neither of which are conservative.

One major aspect of incessantly negative coverage is Russia. “For the second year in a row,” NewsBusters notes, “the Russia investigation was the single most-covered topic amid the networks’ Trump coverage, garnering 858 minutes of airtime. Since January 20, 2017, the Russia probe has received 2,092 minutes of coverage on just the three evening newscasts.”

Or, as humorist Dave Barry put it, “That was all we heard about, day after soul-crushing day, for the entire year.”

Oddly, Trump’s relationship with the mainstream media is almost symbiotic. As we’ve noted before, the Leftmedia gave Trump $5 billion in free airtime during the 2016 campaign in what was supposed to prop him up for a sure loss to Hillary Clinton. Beset by Trump Derangement Syndrome after he won and desperate for ad revenue, the media ramped up the negative attacks. But Trump feeds off of those attacks, and, as with Democrats retaking the House, he arguably benefits from having a foil or a villain. He loves battling “the FAKE NEWS media,” which he calls “the enemy of the American People!”

It works. NewsBuster (a division of MRC) says, “Despite the media’s obvious disapproval, public opinion of the President actually improved slightly during 2018, from an average 40% approval on January 1 to 42.7% approval on December 31, according to RealClearPolitics.” We noted a similar trend last May.

A Republican with less backbone — which is to say virtually every other Republican — would have backed down long ago in the face of this media barrage. Not Trump, for good or ill. The real collusion scandal in our nation is between the media and the Democrat Party. This study is another marker.

As a final question: What would our 50/50 political landscape look like if media coverage was 50/50 instead of 90/10?