Bias by the Minute

Voters who have relied on the network evening newscasts for information about the 2016 presidential candidates saw four times more airtime devoted to controversies involving presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump than to the scandals surrounding his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. During the recently concluded primary season (January 1 to June 7), the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts conveyed…

A Media Research Center analysis of all 950 ABC, CBS and NBC weekday and weekend evening news stories about the 2016 presidential campaign from January 1 to June 7 finds the broadcast networks organized their coverage to ensure that Clinton’s historic candidacy was almost entirely reported by women correspondents, while the GOP race was largely reported by male correspondents.

Despite Trump being the only candidate remaining in the GOP race, his supporters accounted for only 12 percent of all participants (9 out of 77 total) in roundtable discussions on Sunday shows from May 8 to May 29. A staple of Sunday political shows, the roundtable discussions give a chance for pundits from across the political spectrum to voice their concerns and opinions about the political…

Asked what he thought of privatizing airport security, the head of the TSA laughably responded that “no matter how you do it, you need federal oversight of the system to ensure consistency and high standards.” Even more laughable, two NBC hosts just accepted that answer and moved along to asking if Congress needs to pay the TSA more. Amid record lines, staffing turnover and scandal, the crew at…

The backlash against the increasing delays caused by the TSA has been so bad that on March 24, the TSA reassigned its head of security. According to CBS Evening News, 450 people missed their flights from Chicago’s O’Hare airport on May 15 because of TSA delays. Despite devoting more than 42 minutes to the abysmal failures of the TSA since coverage began on May 10, neither ABC, CBS nor NBC once…

The broadcast news networks couldn’t get enough of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan – until a leading Democrat in town became the target of a corruption lawsuit. Despite spending 1 hour and 42 minutes discussing the Flint since the story broke onto the national stage in December, 2015, the evening news shows of ABC, CBS and NBC have completely ignored reports that Flint’s Democrat mayor…

A look at the past four months of news coverage shows Donald Trump received three times as much TV news coverage as his closest rival, Ted Cruz, and a whopping 15 times as much as John Kasich. On the Democratic side, however, the gap was much narrower, with Bernie Sanders getting more than two minutes of TV news coverage for every three minutes given to Hillary Clinton. In other words, the…

On the one-year anniversary of the riots and systematic failures of Democrat-run Baltimore in Democrat-run Maryland, only CBS Evening News managed to acknowledge that anything even happened. ABC's World News Tonight’s only mention of Baltimore or Freddie Gray was a throwaway line in an April 22 obituary for the pop singer Prince, where correspondent Byron Pitts noted that “Prince was an artist…

Yesterday, NewsBusters reported that cable news has awarded Donald Trump and his surrogates significantly more airtime than the other Republican candidates. Today, we report how those same networks have divvied up the airtime between Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and challenger Bernie Sanders. Unlike the top two Republican candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns…

A team of MRC analysts logged each prime time interview of a presidential candidate or a plainly-identified supporter or surrogate on CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel from March 21 to April 15, weekdays only, poring over approximately 240 hours of programming. Our study found that the Fox News Channel spent much more time interviewing Donald Trump and his surrogates than either of his GOP…

On April 13, ABC’s World News Tonight correspondent Tom Llamas devoted most of that night’s report to chilling death threats against the Colorado state Republican party chairman, angered at how Donald Trump failed to win any delegates at the weekend party convention. That one report, plus two minor mentions on ABC and CBS, is all of broadcast news attention given to these threats. But the…

In March, the GOP nomination contest winnowed to essentially a two-man race between frontrunner Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, with Ohio Governor John Kasich trailing far behind. Yet the broadcast networks spent much less time on Cruz and essentially ignored Kasich, giving Donald Trump a whopping 72 percent of the Republican airtime last month. Trump's 267 minutes of coverage was more…

In just the last three weeks, ABC, CBS and NBC’s evening newscasts have generated nearly 16 minutes of coverage looking at charges of misconduct against Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. That’s more than eight times the coverage than they’ve given over the past eight months to serious questions surrounding top Clinton aide Huma Abedin for her role in a variety of Clinton scandals…

NBC anchor Chuck Todd isn’t buying the National Enquirer hit piece on Ted Cruz. On the March 27 edition of Meet the Press, Todd commented that “there’s more evidence that ties Trump to planting the story, than there is to the story itself tying anything to Cruz.”