In less than two weeks, voters head to the polls in midterm elections that seem certain to yield strong Republican gains, if not outright control of the U.S. Senate. Such a political sea change is big news, but a new Media Research Center study finds that, in contrast to their enthusiastic coverage of the 2006 midterms when Democrats made big gains, the Big Three broadcast evening newscasts are all but ignoring this year’s political contests.
MRC Study
By Rich Noyes | September 8, 2014 | 4:50 PM EDT
As President Obama’s approval ratings have tumbled in 2014, polling news has practically vanished from the Big Three evening newscasts — in stunning contrast to how those same newscasts relentlessly emphasized polls showing bad news for George W. Bush during the same phase of his presidency.
By Rich Noyes | August 18, 2014 | 7:51 AM EDT
What’s the difference between a political scandal involving a Republican and one involving a Democrat? When it comes to news coverage, reporters almost always identify the political party of a Republican caught in a scandal, but when the culprit is a Democrat, the party label is usually left out of the story.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but not many. To prove the point, here’s how ABC, CBS and NBC have identified (or failed to identify) the figures in 16 political scandals — 8 Democrats, 8 Republicans — as documented by NewsBusters during the past few years:
By NB Staff | April 24, 2014 | 2:01 PM EDT
Sean Hannity interviewed MRC president Brent Bozell on his Fox News show on Wednesday night. The topic? MRC research on the revolving door between the “objective” media and the Obama administration, which now has a list of 30 people.
“This is out of control,” said Bozell. “We've been looking at this since 1987. And that revolving door is always there. It's always predominantly liberal Democrats going into politics or going from politics into journalism. But in the last several years it's on steroids.” Start with the 1 pm and 2 pm hosts on MSNBC (video, transcript below):
By Ken Oliver-Méndez | April 8, 2014 | 10:20 AM EDT
As promised, following its launch last week, the Media Research Center’s new Hispanic media arm, MRC Latino, is conducting ongoing analysis of the news coverage on the country’s top Spanish-language television networks. In this space, as well as bilingually on the Facebook page and Twitter account of MRC Latino, we’ll be calling out instances of slanted, incomplete or inaccurate news coverage on these networks as we see it, as well as pointing out especially well-done news stories, whenever merited.
Along those lines, it’s worth noting that in the days since MRC Latino’s launch, there have been some indications of an uptick in participation by conservative leaders being quoted or cited in major Spanish-language media news stories, including those covered by the flagship national evening news programs of Univision and Telemundo (the subjects of MRC Latino’s initial study).
By Rich Noyes | October 17, 2013 | 11:02 AM EDT
For millions of Americans, big political contests such as presidential elections and pivotal congressional hearings are still largely witnessed through the lens of ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s evening newscasts. According to Nielsen Research, more than 20 million viewers tuned in over the past two weeks for the Big Three’s take on the shutdown drama.
What those viewers heard, according to a just-completed Media Research Center study, was a version of the shutdown story that could easily have emanated from Barack Obama’s own White House. The broadcast networks invariably blamed Republicans for the impasse; spotlighted dozens of examples of how Americans were being victimized; and ran scores of soundbites from furloughed federal workers and others harmed by the shutdown — even as they ignored examples of how the Obama administration and Senate Democrats were working to make the shutdown as painful as possible.
By Rich Noyes | October 2, 2013 | 1:47 PM EDT
On Monday morning, Time/MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin explained an obvious political reality to his fellow Morning Joe panelists: “The White House does not have much incentive” to negotiate on the government shutdown, because Democrats expect the liberal news media to hand them a public relations victory. As Halperin put it: “The press is largely sympathetic to their arguments that it’s the House Republicans’ fault.”
In fact, as a new Media Research Center analysis of broadcast network evening news coverage shows, ABC, CBS and NBC spent the two weeks prior to the shutdown almost universally pinning the blame on congressional Republicans, especially conservative/Tea Party House Republicans. By the time the shutdown actually took place on October 1, news audiences had been repeatedly instructed to think about it as a GOP-generated crisis.
By Rich Noyes | September 7, 2013 | 9:00 AM EDT
Last year, the national media spent the campaign highlighting (or inventing) problems for the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, while downplaying or ignoring the shortcomings in Barack Obama’s record as President. Next year, we’ll find out if the media will be more successful than they were in 2010, when they attempted to marginalize and discredit conservative Tea Party candidates in a campaign that turned out to be a crushing defeat for liberals.
This year, however, there’s really only one major political race on the political radar: the Virginia governor’s race between former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe (a longtime associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton) and Republican Ken Cuccinelli, currently the state’s attorney general. And a new MRC study of major newspapers in the state finds the GOP candidate is receiving far more negative coverage than his Democratic counterpart — just four positive stories vs. 95 negative ones, a whopping 24-to-1 margin.
By Rich Noyes | October 22, 2012 | 7:58 AM EDT
When CBS’s longtime Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer sits down in Boca Raton, Florida, tonight to moderate the final 2012 presidential debate, he’ll be following three journalists who became targets for criticism over how they handled their moderating duties.
Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.
By Rich Noyes | October 16, 2012 | 8:14 AM EDT
Tonight’s town hall-style presidential debate will ostensibly feature questions from undecided voters, but the evening’s agenda will really be decided by the moderator, as CNN’s Candy Crowley will select which of the more than roughly 80 voters in the room will actually get a chance to talk to the candidates.
Reviewing the five previous town hall debates, the journalist-moderators have tended to skew the agenda of these so-called citizen forums to the liberal side of the spectrum, but not always. Overall, questions have been twice as likely to favor liberal causes versus conservative ones.
By Rich Noyes | June 20, 2012 | 2:35 PM EDT
The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule any day now on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidency thus far. How the media cover such a decision remains to be seen, but between 2004 and 2008 the Court issued multiple rulings tossing out key elements of George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, the policy centerpiece of that administration.
The MRC studied how the broadcast networks covered those decisions overruling Bush’s policy on detaining terror suspects, looking at the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage from the day each ruling was handed down — June 28, 2004, June 29, 2006 and June 12, 2008. On those nights, the networks aired a total of 15 stories about the Supreme Court rulings, totaling nearly 35 minutes of airtime. The results provide a template for how the networks might cover a decision voiding some or all of President Obama’s health care law — assuming network journalists approach their job without regard to partisanship, that is.
By Tim Graham | April 4, 2012 | 5:14 PM EDT
Christians are entering the most important season on the annual calendar, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. But the national media often treat Christianity as a religion that imposes itself too aggressively on American society. To review this hostility, MRC has compiled a new Special Report titled "Secular Snobs: Documenting the National Media's Long-Standing Hostility to Religion."
Even in this campaign, reporters have sneered that conservatives like Rick Santorum are seeking a theocracy like Iran or a Christian version of Sharia law. We've gone all the way back to the MRC's founding in 1987 to remember this bias over the years.