Bias by the Minute

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.”

Despite the fact that there’s a complete lack of solid sourcing in the sleazy National Enquirer allegations against Ted Cruz, all three networks on Monday morning reported on the story again, offering an additional three minutes and 44 seconds. This is on top of 11 minutes and 43 seconds devoted to the sketchy claims from Friday through Sunday. In total, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening…

Despite all three broadcast evening news shows running stories on ISIS on March 10, not one of them mentioned a report submitted that day to Secretary of State John Kerry documenting that ISIS’s persecution of Christians has reached the level of genocide. In fact, in all of 2016 so far, the topic of Christian persecution by ISIS hasn’t been mentioned even once. 

Once again in February, ABC, CBS and NBC devoted a majority of their Republican primary coverage to Donald Trump, who received three times more attention than his top competitors, Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Since the start of the campaign, Trump has received a total of 923 minutes of airtime from the three broadcast evening newscasts, or 54 percent of the total GOP coverage. This is more…

On the eve of Super Tuesday, the network evening newscasts went all out with 24 minutes and 31 seconds of 2016 coverage and made it clear Donald Trump was far and away the most important story to them with over 62 percent of that time spent salivating on how “there’s not much” Trump opponents “can do to stop him from getting the nomination.” Trump fetched an astonishing 15 minutes and 19 seconds…