World News Tonight

Wednesday's evening news shows and Thursday's morning programs continued to minimize or leave out important moments of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings. ABC's Good Morning America, for instance, has offered only 67 seconds of coverage over three days. Today and The Early Show each provided a single ten second news brief on Thursday. It's not as though the second day of…

“For the first time, Americans got to see the woman President Obama called a ‘trailblazer’ in action,” ABC anchor Diane Sawyer trumpeted Tuesday night before Jonathan Karl framed his story on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s hearing around how “a confirmation hearing isn't usually a laughing matter, but if we learned one thing about Elena Kagan today, it's that she has a sense of humor.” Like…

All three network evening newscasts on Monday downplayed the start of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings, with NBC Nightly News squeezing in just 24 seconds for Kagan at the tail end of a story about the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor the 2nd Amendment. For their part, CBS and ABC offered full stories outlining Kagan’s first day before the Judiciary committee after…

The networks Monday night skipped lightly over the late Senator Robert Byrd's segregationist and racist record, devoting as much time to the Democrat's fiddle-playing prowess as his years in the Ku Klux Klan, which CBS's Chip Reid excused as “an effort to help his political career.” Leading into file video of Byrd playing his fiddle, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer declared “Byrd was a powerhouse and old…

Based on the view of a single economist, ABC portrayed the agreement by world powers, at the G-20 summit in Toronto, to pursue fiscal sanity over the accelerated government spending urged by President Barack Obama, as a threat the well-being of the American people. “President Obama lost an argument today with other world leaders, and some economists say that could plunge the world into a second…

When President Obama picked Elena Kagan to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the broadcast networks referred to the upcoming Senate confirmation process as “contentious” a “meat grinder” and a “battle,” warning Kagan was “in for a fight.”But a Media Research Center analysis of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts in the six weeks since Kagan was nominated shows the broadcast…

ABC, CBS and NBC all led Tuesday night with multiple stories on the “firestorm” over disrespectful coments by General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about President Obama and other administration officials, but ABC's Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos particularly despaired over the position in which McChrystal has put Obama. Sawyer fretted that Obama “now faces a mind-boggling choice,”…

Network anchors can’t resist misconstruing Arizona’s upcoming immigration enforcement law. The latest instances came Friday night when ABC and NBC caught up with news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an interviewer in Ecuador that the Obama administration will sue to block the law. Diane Sawyer erroneously described the anti-illegal immigration measure as “Arizona's controversial new…

The day after President Obama’s oil spill speech — in which the President pivoted from the ongoing mess in the Gulf of Mexico to his call for ending our “addiction” to fossil fuels — ABC’s World News obliged the White House’s agenda with a profile of solar cell manufacturer Natcore, whose president, Chuck Provini, says he can cut the costs of solar cells (which are right now too expensive to be…

The network morning and evening news shows have all but ignored President Obama's Saturday letter to congressional leaders asking for $50 billion in additional spending to prevent the "massive layoffs of teachers, police, and firefighters." Only Sunday's Good Morning America on ABC has covered the President's request so far.The chief executive's June 12 letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate…

ABC anchor Diane Sawyer greeted Meg Whitman’s victory in California’s Republican gubernatorial primary by putting forward Democrat Jerry Brown as the savior protecting the nation against Whitman becoming Governor. “Jerry Brown told us today, he wants the country to know that he sees this as an epic duel in California between the politics of ideas and the power of money,” Sawyer warned from Los…

On Tuesday’s World News, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos touted how “we've got a new poll out tonight that shows the Tea Party may be losing steam nationwide” as its unfavorable rating has “gone up eleven points in the last couple of months to 50 percent. Their favorable rating has gone down.” Stephanopoulos and ABC, however, didn’t find time, in multiple stories on the oil leak, to inform viewers…

The three evening news shows on Monday treated the announcement of Helen Thomas' retirement as an occasion to gush over the "bona fide icon" and "trailblazer." At the same time, CBS's Evening News, NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News didn't find much time for outrage over Thomas' attacks on Jews and Israel. Instead, NBC's Andrea Mitchell played a clip of Thomas ranting to President Bush in a…