Bias by the Minute

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…

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.…

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.

The network evening and morning shows seem to have badly misplaced priorities. ABC, CBS and NBC have already devoted 10 times more coverage to the Olympic swimmer “scandal” than they did the bombshell admission that the Obama administration linked the release of four American prisoners and a $400 million payment to Iran. 

Shocking news broke Thursday that the handoff of the $400 million cash payment to Iran was a highly coordinated endeavor and did not occur until the American hostages were safe. These new details lend farther evidence to the argument that the cash was a ransom payment. But when it came to reporting this development the “Big Three” networks barely gave it anytime at all.

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…

Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should have been forced to deal with campaign messes on Tuesday, but the three networks only treated the Republican’s problem as a huge gaffe worthy of extensive coverage. ABC, CBS and NBC deluged viewers with five times more coverage — 25 minutes and 35 seconds versus 4 minutes and 41 seconds —  to Trump’s “Second Amendment people” remark than they did to…