Bias by the Minute

A Media Research Center study finds that, over a two week period, coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign took up nearly 78 percent of all CNN’s prime time GOP campaign coverage – 580 minutes out of a total of 747 minutes. All 16 non-Trump candidates got a combined total of just 167 minutes.

Two weeks after the first GOP presidential debate of Campaign ’16, the broadcast networks continue to obsess over Donald Trump to the near-exclusion of the other sixteen Republican presidential candidates. An MRC analysis of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts during the two weeks prior to the August 6 debate (including weekends) found Trump accounted for 55% of all GOP candidate airtime…

Over the past 9 days, ABC News has spent a grand total of 46 seconds on Planned Parenthood executives trying to sell pieces of aborted babies for a profit. Yet, ABC’s Good Morning America on July 23, found 2 minutes to discuss how a beauty pageant contestant might be posing a threat to sharks.

Despite briefly mentioning at least six reported instances of American citizens joining ISIS in June, and multiple FBI warnings about ISIS’s influence in the United States, the networks chose to devote more time to the “threat” posed by the existence of the Confederate flag. The evening news shows of ABC, CBS and NBC spent just 17 minutes, 35 seconds on the threat ISIS poses to American, and 37…

The hunt for convicted killers who escaped a prison in New York State was the most covered topic on the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC for the month of June. This was closely followed by coverage of the brutal massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, with considerable amounts of air time dedicated to the 2016 presidential campaign, the ISIS terror threat and the Supreme…

Back in 2008, the three broadcast evening newscasts showered then-Democratic candidate Barack Obama with good press during his trip to Europe that July, giving it a total of 92 minutes over an eight-day period (July 20 to July 27, 2008). GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s trip to Europe last week didn’t garner a single mention on ABC’s World News Tonight or the CBS Evening News.

In May, as ISIS terrorists captured the cities of Ramadi and Palmyra, and with FBI warnings of hundreds of radicalized sympathizers here in the U.S., ABC, CBS and NBC devoted a combined 84.5 evening news minutes to ISIS. Despite the dour news, viewers heard virtually no criticism of President Obama’s handling of the terror group — just 43 seconds in a pair of NBC Nightly News stories, or less…

As they did in April, the Big Three network evening news broadcasts in May spent more airtime talking about alleged police misconduct than any other single topic – nearly 109 minutes, more than the amount devoted to the Amtrak train derailment, the horrific floods in Texas or the war against ISIS. Nearly all of that network airtime was devoted to just three instances of alleged misconduct (in…

If you're more afraid of the cop on the corner than ISIS, maybe you should blame the media. In the month of April, according to a new survey by the Media Research Center, allegations of police misconduct accounted for one out of every seven minutes of broadcast evening news airtime, or 3 hours, 43 minutes.