***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
While they are rightly spending a lot of time covering the coronavirus crisis, the media were still political entities. ABC proved that fact during Sunday’s This Week when three of their journalists (chief anchor George Stephanopoulos, chief White House correspondent Jon Karl, and senior congressional correspondent Mary Bruce) hyped how President Trump’s campaign messaging took a massive hit and his poll numbers were sinking. One even floated the idea that the Senate majority could be in play.
Stephanopoulos led the trio in their hopeful 2020 banter. “And Jon Karl, it does seem that the President and his team are only beginning to come to grips with what this does mean for his re-election prospects. They're dealing now with should the press briefings continue. That's one question, but basically the entire rationale he had two months ago has just been decimated by this coronavirus,” he gawked.
Karl thought Stephanopoulos was “absolutely” correct because the polling was against the President. “He [Trump] was running on the economy and now what he's trying out is we've built the greatest economy in history, now we can build it again,” he explained. “But George, they are looking at the polling, and obviously it's early to be talking about general election polling, but it's pretty devastating.”
It’s strange when journalists lean so heavily on poll results when all the 2016 polls claimed Trump was going to lose right up until the end.
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