Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh wrote in an April 28 WorldNetDaily article:
A noted pollster is warning that Joe Biden's approval numbers, though slightly positive, are a dark omen because they are significantly below most recent presidents.
"The fact he's only in the low 50s right now is a really bad sign for Joe Biden," pollster John McLaughlin said in a report by Just the News.
He said the problem is that the president is governing as an extreme leftist – after having promised the American people he would be a moderate.
"He's taken what should have been very popular issues — COVID relief, infrastructure — that Americans overwhelmingly support and turned those into radical left-wing pieces of legislation," said McLaughlin said in the report. "Republicans can't wait to get into election season and talk about some of the things that are in those bills ... expanding the welfare state, tax increases, basically open borders. That's not where the American people are right now."
Biden is just at 100 days in office and his job approval ratings actually are mostly assessed in polls at being just above 50%.But ABC has reported that the average approval rating for the past 14 presidents at this point in their terms is 66%.
The only ratings lower than Biden's were for Gerald Ford, who was under attack for his pardon of Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, whose first term was plagued by the unrelenting – and false – claims by Democrats and their allies in the legacy media about "Russia collusion."
Unruh forgot to report one important thing: McLaughlin worked for Trump's re-election campaign, so perhaps his perspective is more than a little biased and colored by partisan politics. The Just the News report from which Unruh cribbed his article did note that fact.
Unruh also tried to obscure just how bad Trump's ratings were. According to the ABC article he referenced, Trump's approval rating in the first 100 days was a mere 42 percent, much lower than Biden's. For Unruh to blame that on the "Russian collusion" story is disingenuous, since much more was going on and Trump had mad his divisiveness all too clear. And if Unruh thinks it's "false" to point out that the Trump campaign had been working with Russians, he clearly didn't read the Mueller report.
Such dishonest reporting isn't likely to get other media outlets to take part in its WND News Center.