Lessons from one month of national TV news coverage of Trump’s $1 billion Big Oil scandal

On May 9, The Washington Post published an exclusive story about an April dinner at Mar-a-Lago in which Donald Trump promised to reverse President Joe Biden's actions on climate change as he asked oil executives to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign. In the first four days of TV news coverage after the story broke, only MSNBC covered Trump’s proposition to Big Oil, airing 48 minutes of coverage; since May 12, all national TV news networks except NBC have aired at least some coverage of the story, bringing the total to 1 hour and 28 minutes. MSNBC has led overall coverage, airing 1 hour and 11 minutes on the story from May 9 through June 9. Among other cable news outlets, CNN aired 9 minutes, followed by Fox News with 3 minutes of coverage. Corporate broadcast TV news aired a mere 4 minutes of combined coverage — CBS aired 3 minutes, while ABC aired the remaining 1 minute. NBC failed to cover the story at all during the studied period. While the volume of coverage of Trump’s Big Oil scandal has varied across networks, some clear lessons have emerged.