Trump: Media Playing Up Coronavirus to Make Him Look Bad

President Trump Wednesday accused the media of using their reporting on the coronavirus to make him look bad in support of his Democratic opponents, slammed suggestions in the media that Joe Biden did better in Tuesday's televised debate, and suggested CBS should not have run a campaign ad for Michael Bloomberg during that debate. 

That came in tweets Wednesday (Feb. 26) in which he went out of his way to associate Comcast with MSNBC (which he called "MSDNC" as a way to suggest the news net was in league with Democrats). 

[embed]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1232652371832004608[/embed][embed]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1232657640515342336[/embed]

CBS did notably have a long, split-screen, commercial for Bloomberg that continued to show the debate stage on the other side of the screen. 

CBS News had no comment on the President's tweet, but according to a source familiar with the process, Bloomberg's was the only campaign to request an ad buy in the debate--for a single spot. Given that broadcasters are required to provide candidate's reasonable access to airtime, the network vetted the ad through standards and practices and, having passed muster, aired it.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.