It appears as if MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) has moved to stop airing the president’s daily coronavirus briefings at the White House. This is certainly the case when it comes to the publicly-funded network’s radio station, which chose to air the program “All Things Considered” instead.
And while it isn’t clear or not whether the MPR website has consistently had the White House press-conferences available on live-stream, the existence of a live stream (if at all) is usually buried toward the bottom of the page.
Yes, there’s been some coverage. But it’s not unreasonable to ask whether MPR has given full coverage to all press-conferences, and what the standard is on whether a daily briefing should be covered or not. In fact, some NPR stations (the national affiliate of MPR) have chosen to not run President Trump’s press conferences altogether.
Alpha News reached out to MPR for comment and didn’t receive any.
In general, the media has come under heavy criticism from conservatives during the coronavirus crisis. For one, the national corporate media began censoring press-conferences as the President’s poll numbers began to rise. Reporters then took to Twitter to throw shade on those poll numbers. Next, the media, especially parts of the media such as NBC, have been highly criticized for parroting Chinese Communist Party propaganda that claimed there were no new coronavirus cases within China—a claim that is equally refuted by a legion of evidence, and facially preposterous.
As for Minnesota’s own MPR, the network has its own glaring anti-conservative bias problems. A “Fact Check” wrote glowingly about Democrat Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, after he “slam[med] Trump’s ventilator claim.” The article’s thrust was an attack on Trump over a dustup between Trump and Democratic governors. While the article made it look like Trump started the controversy, it was objectively started by Democrats when they claimed that the Trump administration had been nefariously withholding ventilators.
Another headline, from weeks ago, reads “EU condemns Trump travel ban from Europe as virus spreads.” Yet another reads “Trump appears to waffle on shutdown as Congress pursues aid.” The article implies that Trump was doing nothing while Congress was acting on the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, and even hints that Trump was not working for the stimulus bill, which is not supported by any evidence whatsoever.
Alpha News searched for any headlines or articles that could be construed as even remotely positive as to administration actions and couldn’t find any.
Willis Krumholz
Willis L. Krumholz is a fellow at Defense Priorities. He holds a JD and MBA degree from the University of St. Thomas, and works in the financial services industry. The views expressed are those of the author only. You can follow Willis on Twitter @WillKrumholz.
