Media Reality Check

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.

Fidel Castro’s communist regime executed hundreds of political opponents and drove tens of thousands more into exile; hundreds of dissidents today languish in Cuban prisons. Yet liberals in the U.S. media — who rightly condemned such abuses when perpetrated by dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet — inexplicably remain enchanted with Castro and his socialist revolution. For almost 30 years,…

The liberal media establishment has spent the past 25 years celebrating Clinton as an “icon of American womanhood,” while fiercely attacking those who would challenge her ethics. Far from impeding Hillary Clinton’s career with critical coverage, the establishment media have enabled her political rise with what amounts to a 25-year long infomercial on her behalf: admiring testimonials about her…

Ever since it was announced, on Friday, that the FBI was pursuing new leads into the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server scandal, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks have gone into attack mode against James Comey, turning what should be a scandal about Clinton into a smear against the FBI director. 

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…

With just three weeks to go, major newspapers (with a circulation of at least 50,000) are walloping Donald Trump in their official endorsements, favoring Hillary Clinton by a count of 68 to zero. Out of a total of 82 newspapers that have offered an editorial on who their readers should vote for, 68 (83 percent) of them have endorsed Hillary Clinton, five (6 percent) recommended Libertarian Party…

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,…

Agents and attorneys at the FBI and State Department are furious about how FBI directory James Comey let Hillary Clinton off the hook and they are finally speaking out. However, if you get your news from the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks you’ve heard nothing about it. Fox News and The New York Post have cited current and former agents in stories that paint a picture of an FBI and State…

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 2016 presidential and vice presidential debates have already been notable for their bias, with NBC’s Lester Holt pounding Donald Trump with a skewed set of questions during the first debate, and CBS’s Elaine Quijano doing the same with Mike Pence on Tuesday. So what should viewers expect at tomorrow night’s town hall-style debate? A look at the past six town hall debates finds — with one…

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…