Fox News spent just 13 minutes covering the E Jean Carroll civil rape trial, compared to several hours of coverage by CNN and MSNBC.
Ms Carroll, a former Elle advice columnist, claims that Mr Trump raped her in a fitting room at a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. She sued him in 2019 and in 2022 after she published her allegation in an excerpt from her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal in New York magazine.
Fox News barely mentioned the trial between 24 April and 2 May, only airing 13 minutes about the trial compared to four hours and 50 minutes on CNN and eight hours and 26 minutes on MSNBC, according to Media Matters For America.
The coverage of the trial on Fox News mostly consisted of short headlines providing limited information about the case.
The network has made a habit of ignoring Mr Trump’s scandals. They recently only spent three minutes on a House report outlining Mr Trump’s issues with his tax returns, and they chose not to report on Trump Organization being convicted on multiple charges of tax fraud.
Media Matters went through transcripts on Snapstream for all the original programming on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
They searched for terms such as “Trump,” “E Jean Carroll”, as well as any misspellings of “Carroll” close to any of the terms “assault,” “rape,” “battery,” “trial,” or “mistrial” and all variations of the terms “sex,” “defame,” or “allege” between 24 April, the day before the trial started, and 2 May.
They timed the segments – meaning when the civil rape case was the topic being covered or when there was significant discussion of the issue, which they defined as two or more people talking about in a segment discussing several topics.
Media Matters also timed the mentions, defining them as when a single person mentioned the case during coverage of a different topic but without another individual speaking about the case.
They also included teasers, such as when an anchor promoted a segment covering the case later on in that broadcast.
The current trial is a battery and defamation case after Mr Trump’s aggressive denials of Ms Carroll’s claim. The recorded deposition of Mr Trump was played in the courtroom on Wednesday afternoon.
Growing angry, Mr Trump rejected the notion that he raped Ms Carroll on “a major floor of a major store.”
“It’s the most ridiculous, disgusting story. It’s just made up,” he said.
Addressing the press during a round of golf at his Doonberg, Ireland resort on Thursday, Mr Trump said he would “probably attend” the trial, which is set to hear its last day of evidence ahead of closing arguments early next week.
“I was falsely accused by this woman, I have no idea who she is – it’s ridiculous,” he said on Thursday. “I’ll be going back early because a woman made a claim that is totally false, it’s fake.”
