Since the January 7 fatal shooting of left-wing agitator Renee Good by an ICE officer, Minneapolis has been gripped by riots, lawlessness, and escalating tensions between activists and federal law enforcement. Meanwhile, left-wing broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC have spent more than two hours of airtime blaming the chaos on immigration officials.  MRC analysts pored through every report about the situation in Minneapolis which aired on ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News, from January 7 through January 17, 2026. We found a total of 121 minutes and 26 seconds of coverage devoted to the topic, of which a whopping 93 percent was negative toward federal immigration officials.   SUMMARY OF FINDINGS ABC, CBS, and NBC’s flagship evening newscasts all hammered ICE with more than 90% negative coverage (91% negative on ABC and NBC, 96% negative on CBS). Just 1.6% of of the Minneapolis-related coverage included any mention of the crimes committed by the illegal aliens whom ICE agents were there to apprehend to begin with. CBS never explicitly admitted that Nicole Good hit agent Jonathan Ross with her car moments before he fired at her. ABC and NBC did so only once each.    NETWORKS FOUND ICE AGENT ROSS GUILTY OF 'MURDER' To determine the skew of the coverage, analysts examined the selection of sound bites about the situation in Minneapolis that each network chose to air. On CBS, 26 of the 27 sound bites were critical of (or, more often, outright hostile toward) ICE. Both ABC and NBC aired 21 such sound bites, versus only two that were positive.  For example on January 14, ABC eagerly highlighted prolific podcaster Joe Rogan’s criticism of the federal government: “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” One of the few quotes that favored ICE actually came from the father of Renee Good’s ex-husband on January 13’s NBC Nightly News, when he said of her fatal encounter with officer Ross: “The car did hit him.” But not even the 93-percent hostility toward federal immigration officials tells the full story of just how stilted the coverage was on the evening newscasts. On January 12, for example, CBS correspondent Nicole Sganga accused ICE agent Jonathan Ross of murdering Nicole Good: DHS this weekend released a video showing the minutes leading up to the murder of Renee Good. She and others are heard honking car horns. Trump administration officials claim she intended to ram ICE agents before she was shot. CBS’s framing of Renee Good’s death was particularly mendacious. While the network repeatedly played the footage from officer Ross’s phone which indisputably showed Good hitting him with her car, not one journalist ever stated as fact that Good’s vehicle had indeed struck Ross. Even anchor Tony Dokoupil only ever framed it as something the Trump administration was claiming. All three networks did mention that Ross reportedly had been sent to the hospital for internal bleeding after the incident. However, each did so only once.   ILLEGAL ALIEN CRIME WAS VIRTUALLY ABSENT FROM COVERAGE Despite the melee in Minneapolis having resulted from a dispute over immigration enforcement, the crimes committed by the detained illegal aliens barely ever came up in the broadcast coverage.  ABC spent a mere 12 seconds on the illegal aliens’ malfeasance, which amounted to just half a percent of their 2290 seconds of coverage.  The situation was virtually identical on CBS: just 16 seconds, or 0.6 percent of their 2633 seconds spent covering Minneapolis. NBC paid the topic the most attention by far: 89 seconds (4% of their 2363-second total), spread across seven different mentions. NBC was also the only network to actually run a graphic detailing some of the alleged crimes perpetrated by the illegal aliens ICE agents had apprehended. On January 12, correspondent Maggie Vespa reported: “DHS touting the work of federal officers in Minneapolis the last few days, saying they’ve arrested criminal suspects in the U.S. illegally, including with convictions for sexual assault of a child, rape of a child, homicide, and manslaughter.” Vespa’s report that evening also included a sound bite of White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt further detailing the rap sheets of several detainees.