Media Reality Check

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…

Once again, ABC, CBS and NBC have ignored a major news story that could be embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and have national implications, while promoting a negative (and trivial) Trump story initially pushed by the Clinton campaign. On September 23, news broke that during the now-infamous investigation into Clinton’s emails, the FBI granted Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills immunity.…

In the weeks leading up to Monday night’s first one-on-one clash between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the liberal media have set the stage for NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt and his fellow presidential debate moderators to be rougher with the GOP nominee. Journalists from the New York Times to CNN have openly declared that Trump is so intolerably “polarizing,” “racist and sexist” that…

Not since Ross Perot in 1996 has a third-party presidential candidate polled as strongly as Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson is right now — he’s currently averaging more than eight percent, according to RealClearPolitics. At the same time, other polls show record levels of voter disapproval for the Democratic and Republican nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In spite of this, the…

Never say they aren’t consistent. As per usual, during 2016 the media ignore Democratic scandals while hyping Republican scandals. Between the three of them, the evening shows of ABC, CBS and NBC spent a combined 6 minutes, 56 seconds on the LePage controversy, just in the month of August. For contrast, here are some Democratic scandals that they neglected to cover:

The broadcast networks have refused to cover the repeated failures of ObamaCare in 2016. During the entire year, ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News have yet to give the floundering program any coverage at all, while CBS Evening News only found time to cover two of the ObamaCare updates – and that only added up to 2 minutes and 18 seconds of coverage for the entire year.

When a white supremacist endorsed Trump, the broadcast networks blamed Trump for it. But when the radical father of a terrorist endorsed Hillary and showed up in the front row of one of her rallies, these same networks quickly dismissed it as nothing worth worrying about. During the first three days of coverage after David Duke endorsed Donald Trump back in February, the evening news shows on ABC…

To ABC and NBC, a Donald Trump misstatement is worth reporting multiple times, but a falsehood by Hillary Clinton isn’t worth a second of coverage. On July 11, Hillary Clinton grossly distorted FBI Director James Comey’s statement on her handling of classified email during a CBS News interview. She restated this assertion to host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

It seems like the only way a military family can get media attention these days is by bashing Donald Trump. On the evening shows of August 1 and the morning shows of August 2, the broadcast morning and evening news shows spent an additional 29 minutes and 53 seconds on the speech by family of slain U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan at the Democratic National Convention, while the same shows only…

Two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention (RNC) a grieving mother blasted Hillary Clinton for the debacle of the 2012 Benghazi attack. Last Thursday, at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), grieving parents gave a speech criticizing Donald Trump for his statements against Muslims. While all the grieving parents deserve sympathy, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) network evening and…

With both the Republican and Democratic conventions now concluded, it’s time to judge the news media on how fairly they covered the two parties. Media Research Center analysts looked at various aspects of coverage, all of which demonstrate that journalists obviously favored the Democratic gathering.

The real test for fair and balanced coverage isn’t the amount of airtime, but the spin reporters employ in reaction to the speeches and events at each convention. Using media coverage of last week’s Republican convention as a template, here are five ways the media can prove they’re not biased by treating the Democrats in a similar fashion.

The morning after the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention, all six broadcast and cable network morning news shows pounced on the fact that Melania Trump's much-touted speech shared similar phrasing with Michelle Obama's 2008 speech to that year's Democratic convention. The flap over Mrs. Trump's speech swamped all other convention topics, especially on cable.