Transcript of The Gap Between Media Coverage and Public Opinion

While the American public remains divided on immigration policy, the legacy media has become almost completely the Unipolar. In this episode, we speak to a Media Research Center analyst about just how tilted the big three newscasts have become on the issue. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor, John Bickley. It's Saturday, January 31st, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us to discuss the latest findings from the Media Research Center, a firm that monitors media bias, is Bill D'Agustino, senior analyst at the MRC. Bill, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Now, President Trump has been slammed in the media just over the past week or so about his deployment of ICE to Minneapolis, and then some of the fallout from that. Those of us in the independent media space have reported a more mixed picture of what's going on, but that hasn't been the prevailing narrative in the legacy press. Your organization, the Media Research Center, has come out with some interesting findings regarding the legacy media's emphasis with their coverage. Can you unpack what your firm has found?

We primarily focus on broadcast networks when we these studies because the three evening newscasts, ABC, NBC, and CBS, average about 18 to 20 million viewers per night, which makes them the most watched news programs in the country. The most recent study, we're still updating the numbers to get it more current. But the most recent full numbers that we have on those evening newscasts were from an 11-day period where the coverage was 93% negative against ICE. Only 7% of it gave any leniency or leeway to ICE. I think most salient, though, of all the details that we picked out from that is that only 1. 6% of any of the coverage had anything to do with crimes committed by some of the illegal aliens, that ICE was there to apprehend to begin with.

Beyond not discussing the very serious crimes that some of these targeted individuals have committed, there's also been very little coverage of things like property damage and intimidation caused by the protesters and some the protest tactics that are putting people in harm's way. Have you also been tabulating some of those more contextual stories?

Largely, yeah. I mean, so it's very rare that all three networks will cover any individual violent incident that makes the rioters or the protester, the left in general, look bad. For example, when the officer Jonathan Ross, who shot Renee Good, when the video from his cell phone, a lot of people were calling it a body cam video, but his cell phone video came out. All three networks showed it. But CBS was actually the only network of the three not to explicitly state that Renee Good actually hit Jonathan Ross with her car. The closest they came was pointing out one time that the Trump administration was claiming that, but never actually officially acknowledged it themselves. Interestingly, just as a side note, CBS was also the worst of the three networks. They were 96% negative on ICE. They were also the only network that had a reporter just outright accuse Jonathan Ross of murder, not even saying alleged or whatever, just straight up said he murdered Renee Good, which I find interesting because there's a lot of hue and cry from the left right now about how CBS has basically become a Trump propaganda network, which our numbers say is very much not the case.

Now, independent media has been reporting on the organized funding and structure of these protests. Has there been any discussion of that angle in the legacy press?

There was none in the... Again, we're still updating the numbers, so I don't know some of the most recent broadcasts. I can't say with 100% certainty that they haven't mentioned it, but certainly there was none of that in the period that we studied and anything that I've looked at since then. We're a few days behind still as far as updating all the numbers. But there's basically no interest whatsoever in investigating what is actually really behind these protests. More importantly, I think, what is the cause of this whole Melee to begin with? Because it's basically there are three things that could or I guess have to change for the temperature to be taken down, which is one, the Trump administration backs down and sends ICE out of the state, stops trying to enforce immigration law. Two, state law enforcement are permitted to assist ICE and protect them from protesters. Three, the left just, in general, stops trying to actually prevent ICE from doing its job. And so only one of those is something that the President of the United States campaigned heavily on, one on, and is now trying to enact. And so basically, all of this is the result of Minnesota being a sanctuary state and Minneapolis being a sanctuary city.

That is never mentioned in any of the coverage. And that's, I think, probably the most important context that you could provide to anybody who has a question of the obvious question of, well, why is this suddenly happening in Minneapolis? Because ICE has been all over the country. Why aren't we seeing this anywhere else? And the answer is that. But the media have absolutely no interest in pointing that out because that makes the left and Democrats, writ large, look bad.

Now, it's not one of the main three nightly broadcasts that you mentioned, but The View also brings in a lot of viewers, and they actually talked about something really interesting on a recent show. I'm wondering if you could weigh in on this. They actually supported and defended the Second Amendment when it came to Alex Pretty, which is a pretty wild departure from their usual stance if you follow their show. Can you describe the argument that was presented on The View?

I mean, this is the low info disingenuous take that's being pushed by a lot of liberals, not necessarily. I mean, some Democrat politicians, too, I guess. But the idea is basically, oh, okay, so just because the guy had a gun when he was interfering with law enforcement and acting aggressive towards them. Suddenly that means they can shoot him, him possessing a gun. Okay, well, I guess the right doesn't support the Second Amendment anymore. That's basically the argument. The thing I think that everybody is failing to notice when they make that argument is the term brandish or the phrase brandish at law enforcement is actually nowhere in the Second Amendment, and I think for probably a pretty obvious reason. But more generally, this is actually fairly consistent for the view in as much as they basically They have no principles and will argue whatever facts they think bolster whatever narrative they're trying to push. If becoming a pro-Second Amendment they think helps their argument, then okay, they'll wear their Second Amendment hat for as long as it takes for them to win the argument.

Now, speaking of CBS, they recently brought up nick Shirley again in the context of some of the unrest in Minneapolis. What are they saying about nick Shirley?

Yeah, nick Shirley, he's an independent journalist, I think, mostly a YouTuber, from what I understand. He went He went around in December of 2025. He went around Minneapolis looking at a lot of these Somali-run daycare centers and found that a lot of them had no kids in them whatsoever. A lot of them seemed to be barely operational, if operational at all. Everybody was very testy with him, wouldn't let him check out the place at all. The implication there is that basically these are scams. These are people not actually providing the services that they're telling the state they're providing and receiving a lot of government funding, which they're basically just pocketing. That's the implication. There's been a ton of aggressive pushback against him from the left in general. The way that the broadcast networks have dealt with Shirley is generally to try to recenter the entire Minneapolis, mostly Somali, fraud story, writ large, around him. Basically, to recontextualize it as, well, all of This came from this right wing YouTuber who went out and shot this this questionable video of him asking to enter daycare centers when he had no right to enter. That's basically the argument that they're making.

Of course, the daycare side of things is significantly smaller than the larger portion, which is health care, where the total is estimated to be about $19 billion of fraud. The reason that they're doing this is basically to minimize what the actual story is.

Now, you mentioned that the big three networks have of a massive combined audience. How do you think the coverage from the legacy press is affecting general support for ICE? Do you think most Americans' opinions at this point are baked in, or is this having a pretty devastating effect?

Probably not as much as these networks would hope that it is. I have seen some polls from YouGov, which I generally don't think many people take too seriously as an accurate gage of public consensus saying that a lot of people think ICE is going too far in their enforcement tactics. But we're seeing a lot of other polls that, and we've seen this, by the way, for the entire Trump administration, second Trump administration's duration so far, that show that the majority of Americans actually do still support mass deportations of illegal aliens. And in fact, it's become this constant source of frustration for the media because every time they pull it, they find that, yeah, it's still a majority of Americans support mass deportations. And everybody is... All of them are basically competing to try to become the first network or the first poll group to finally find a way to phrase the question at the right time with the right cohort of poll respondents to get that under 50% result. So then everybody can run headlines of, Oh, has America turned on ICE's immigration plan?

Well, Bill, this was very helpful. Thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

That was Bill D'Agostino from the Media Research Center, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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