Bias by the Minute

CNN President Jeff Zucker went on the defensive Wednesday night, when a room full of campaign surrogates called him out for his network’s lopsided campaign coverage. However, as a surrogate for a former GOP candidate pointed out, the MRC has proven that CNN's track record this campaign season has been anything but defensible.

When Jill Stein was the Green Party’s candidate for U.S. president, the networks only gave her 36 seconds of coverage. However, as soon as she launched a campaign to contest the presidential election and demand a recount of ballots in several key states, the evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC managed to find 7 minutes and 26 seconds of coverage for her in just four days.

Since Sunday evening, ABC, CBS and NBC (along with a host of other establishment media outlets) have been engaged in a feeding frenzy over Donald Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, with reporters relentlessly employing phrases such as “white nationalist,” “white supremacist,” “extremist,” “racist” and “anti-Semitic” to solidify the image of Bannon as a dangerous pick for a top White House…

Like the old saying goes: The apple doesn’t far fall from the tree. According to new e-mails released by WikiLeaks, both Chelsea Clinton and her husband Mark Mezvinsky leveraged the Clinton Foundation for personal gain. Number of seconds devoted to these scandals by the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks? 0  

Despite skyrocketing premiums, major insurance companies backing out, and one state exchange after another failing, in all of 2016, the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC have only devoted 10 minutes and 21 seconds combined to ObamaCare failures. Until Bill Clinton called the Affordable Care Act “this crazy system” on October 3, ABC and NBC hadn’t covered any ObamaCare news in 2016 at…

While there is no shortage of negative coverage of Donald Trump, the broadcast networks continue to bury, ignore or downplay negative news about Hillary Clinton. As NewsBusters has pointed out before, even when the broadcast networks cover the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, they pick and choose which released emails to cover. Many emails that…

In the twelve weeks since the party conventions concluded in late July, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has received significantly more broadcast network news coverage than his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but nearly all of that coverage (91%) has been hostile, according to a new study by the Media Research Center (MRC). The networks spent far more airtime focusing on the…

From Friday evening to Thursday morning, the morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated 4 hours and 13 minutes to discussing the recent allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, not only has the continual release of the WikiLeaks emails from top Hillary staff gotten a comparatively puny 36 minutes of coverage during this same time period,…

Since Friday, ABC, CBS and NBC have inundated viewers with more than 200 minutes on a tape showing Trump making inappropriate remarks. However, these same networks gave 24 minutes, 5 seconds to the Wikileaks release of multiple years’ worth of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s staff – but very little of this coverage was on specific emails or issues that were brought up by the emails. 

The media’s fascination with the Trump-and-Billy-Bush tape keeps adding up. In the first three days of coverage – Friday evening through Monday morning – the ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news programs have aired more than 150 minutes of coverage. The feeding frenzy over Trump’s crude sex talk dwarfs the media focus on Bill Clinton’s crude sex talk – and actions. On February 11, 1994,…

An MRC analysis of the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows from Friday evening, October 7 through Sunday evening, October 9, found a whopping 103 minutes of airtime devoted to audio recordings of Donald Trump talking about his attempted sexual conquests, but less than eight minutes spent on speech excerpts showing Hillary Clinton boasting in her speeches to big Wall Street banks that…

According to a recently released batch of emails, White House and State Department Staff had conspired to pressure CBS to not ask Kerry anything about Clinton’s email scandal during a Face the Nation interview on March 15, 2015. Jennifer Palmieri, the former White House communications director sent an email about this very interview asking "[t]hink we can get this done so he is not asked about…

For 90 minutes Tuesday night, the media spotlight will be aimed squarely at Indiana Governor Mike Pence and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, the Republican and Democratic vice presidential candidates. And, unless one of them makes a colossal mistake during their debate, it will probably be the last time either candidate gets much national TV attention this year.

The recurring media narrative of 2016 continues: stories that could embarrass Donald Trump get lots of coverage, while stories that embarrass Hillary Clinton get little or none. In today’s episode, the three broadcast news networks yawned at newly released audio of Hillary Clinton disparaging Sanders voters who “lived in their parents’ basement.” But when an anonymous source leaked three pages…