Last week, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent nearly 100 minutes covering leaked messages from a private Signal chat for Trump administration officials, in just the first 96 hours after the messages were published. But those same networks spent only 13 minutes covering the actual military operation that was discussed in those leaked messages.
In mid-March, the United States launched a still-ongoing series of airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, in retaliation for more than 100 reported attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea. The operation, which would ultimately prove successful, initially received moderate coverage from broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC — until two weeks later, when Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published screenshots showing Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other U.S. officials discussing the strikes in a private Signal chat.
The broadcast networks, which had long since dropped their light coverage of the strikes, immediately flooded the airwaves with the “Signalgate” story. That night, all three networks front-loaded their evening newscasts with lengthy reports about the mishap. In that single evening, the networks devoted more combined air time to the Signal messages than they’d spent on the airstrikes for the entire duration of the military operation two weeks prior.
MRC analysts examined the first 96 hours of coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC’s flagship morning and evening news shows, for both the air strikes (the evening of March 15 through the morning of March 19) and the Signal messages (the evening of March 24 through the morning of March 28). The “Signalgate” story received a whopping 99 minutes and 40 seconds across all three networks, while the combined total time spent on the Yemen airstrikes totaled just 13 minutes and 47 seconds.
In aggregate, that comes out to 7.2 times more coverage for the leaked chat messages. But that ratio would have been significantly higher without ABC, which spent both the least time on the Signal story (31 minutes and 53 seconds), and the most on the airstrikes (9 minutes, 20 seconds).
CBS, meanwhile, gave a colossal 16 times more coverage to the Signal story (35 minutes, nine seconds, versus two minutes, 12 seconds). Things weren’t much better on NBC, which devoted 14.5 times more coverage to Signal (32 minutes, 38 seconds, versus two minutes, 15 seconds).
The Signal story broke on March 24, when Goldberg revealed he had been added inadvertently to a private group chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. As of this piece’s publishing, Waltz continues to maintain that he did not add any journalists to the group, but Goldberg published screenshots proving he did manage to gain entry.
To say the least, it’s newsworthy that a journalist was able to gain access to a private channel in which officials were discussing an ongoing military operation. But fortunately, the operation itself was not affected by Goldberg’s presence in the chat, and it was executed without incident and with no casualties.
If the broadcast networks who relentlessly covered this Signal debacle were seriously interested in the national security angle, one might expect they’d have paid a similar amount of attention to the actual airstrikes that were discussed in the leaked messages. But that’s not what the numbers bear out.
Instead, they ran a deluge of reports about an incompetently-managed group chat, but showed nowhere near the same level of interest in the competently-executed military operation underpinning the whole story.