If you ask Republican primary voters — as CBS News did — why they don’t plan to vote for Donald Trump, the most common reason is simply that they prefer other candidates. The next reason on the list for just over half of those who don’t plan to vote for him is that Trump is too “controversial.” In third place, at 50 percent: “how he deals with political opponents.”
It’s only when you get to the fourth-most cited reason, one chosen by about 2 in 5 Republicans who say they don’t plan to vote for Trump — in other words, a fraction of a fraction of the party — is the swarm of legal issues that surround the primary front-runner.
To an outside observer, this might be hard to fathom. Trump has already been indicted in Manhattan, is facing a defamation and battery trial brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleges he raped her, and may well face charges at both the federal level and in Fulton County, Ga., related to his post-2020 election machinations. But all of this is fourth on the list of reasons Trump-skeptical Republicans aren’t interested in supporting him.
There’s one obvious contributor to this: Right-wing media is (and has long been) barely covering these issues. When they do, the tone often mirrors Trump’s — which is to say it’s dismissive.
Consider the lawsuit brought by Carroll, which is underway in a courtroom in New York. Carroll claimed in a book that Trump raped her in the dressing room at a New York department store in the 1990s; a change in New York that state law allowed her to file suit in 2022. Trump has denied the allegation.
When Carroll’s allegation first emerged in June 2019, CNN mentioned it on-air more than 130 times, according to closed-captioning data gathered by the internet Archive. MSNBC mentioned it more than 110 times. Fox News mentioned it less than 10 times.
This year, the pattern has been similar. CNN has mentioned Carroll more than 230 times and MSNBC more than 440. Fox News has mentioned her seven times.
(The animated charts in this article identify the search terms used to measure mentions. Since “E.” is only one letter, it was excluded from the above searches.)
This is similar to Fox News’s approach to the allegations against Trump involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels that emerged in 2018 — and were at the heart of Trump’s New York indictment this year. Back then, The Washington Post reported that Fox News’s prime time shows barely mentioned Daniels. That pattern has continued, particularly relative to the competition.
Daniels (you’ll recall, given that you read The Post) was the focus of an effort to bury a story about an alleged affair with Trump before the 2016 election. So was Playboy model Karen McDougal — who similarly didn’t come up a lot on Fox News.
There are some stories that Fox spends more time covering, like the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago event space in August. CNN and MSNBC still covered the issue more than Fox, but the gap was not as large.
Much of the Fox News coverage, of course, compared the Mar-a-Lago search to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election or claimed it was aimed at hobbling Trump’s 2024 chances.
When it was reported that documents with classification markings had also been found at President Biden’s think-tank office and his home in Delaware, Fox News discussed it more than did CNN or MSNBC.
If special counsel Jack Smith determines that Trump’s efforts to retain documents with classification markings violated federal law, the heavily Republican Fox News audience has been primed to reject that determination as unfair or unwarranted.
If charges emerge in Fulton County, Ga., as seems likely, it may actually surprise the network’s audience. Since Trump was first recorded cajoling state officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election in January 2021, Fox News has mentioned the county in the context of Trump less than 100 times. CNN has mentioned it more than 800 times and MSNBC twice as often as CNN.
Over and over, the same pattern: Information about Trump’s legal travails is downplayed on the channel that, over the course of Trump’s presidency, was the most trusted outlet for his supporters.
That’s not likely to change over the short term. The ouster of host Tucker Carlson last week has left Fox News again vulnerable to poaching from far-right media outlets like Newsmax. Retaining a pro-Trump audience means increasingly downplaying or rationalizing his challenges rather than amplifying them.
And this pattern, very clearly, is a key reason Trump’s legal issues aren’t a primary motivator for those who are skeptical of his 2024 candidacy.