I tried this experiment: I Googled the word “unpopular,” just the single word. Then I hit the “News” tab. I did no sorting. Here are the results, in order, from legacy media outlets,
- CNN: Fact check: Trump falsely claims his highly unpopular big bill is the ‘single most popular bill ever signed.’
- MSNBC: ‘Not hyperbole’: Trump’s ‘popular’ law is actually the most unpopular in 30 years.
- HuffPost: The GOP’s Big Bill Is Massively Unpopular — If People Actually Know About It
- Time: The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Is Massively Unpopular and Democrats Plan to Keep It That Way
That’s just the first page of results, I could go on. The Time headline gets closest to the real story: the media/Democrats have concluded that the One Big Beautiful Bill must be unpopular, so that they will keep reporting that it is unpopular, in the fervent hope that it one day will become unpopular (cf. Russia Russia Russia hoax.)
The Huffington Post gives the game away with their subheadline,
One survey found that almost half the electorate hasn’t heard anything about Trump’s signature policy.
That’s an entirely rational response from the electorate. I didn’t bother myself, as it seemed for the longest time that nothing would be left of the bill after the Senate Parliamentarian finally finished her work. I’m sure the text has been available online for weeks. You could have sat through the 18-hour reading of the text on the Senate floor last weekend.
By why bother, until it was signed by the President, there was no guarantee it would even get to the finish line.
Consider HuffPo‘s framing,
The central ideas in the law — cutting taxes for the wealthy while slashing health and food aid for the poor and pouring money into an increasingly unpopular deportation machine and exploding the federal debt — are astoundingly unpopular.
“Increasingly,” “astoundingly.” Those adverbs are working hard. Who could possibly favor any of that? The rest of the article consists of Democrats and media pointing the fingers at each other over why the bill isn’t actually unpopular.
The results have some Democrats blaming journalists for not covering the legislation more — Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden declared on social media it meant the news media “failed” — even though those consuming news coverage have an overwhelmingly negative opinion of the bill.
If you are among the increasingly few people who consume news from legacy media, then you think the bill is wildly unpopular. What’s astounding is the admission that they are only reaching half the electorate, the half who already agrees with them.
