Since Joe Biden exited the 2024 presidential race four weeks ago, the liberal networks have delivered an unprecedented boost of positive publicity to his successor in the race, Vice President Kamala Harris. Not only has Harris received 66% more airtime than former President Donald Trump, but the spin of Harris’s coverage has been more positive (84%) than any other major party nominee, even as Trump’s coverage has been nearly entirely hostile (89% negative).
As always, our calculation of spin omits so-called “horse race” assessments (see methodology statement below), but a separate count shows those statements have also favored Harris by a whopping margin (94% positive, vs. just 43% positive for Trump). At the same time, the network coverage has virtually eliminated any discussion of the strident left-wing positions Harris took as Senator or during her 2020 presidential campaign. And while Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance and his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, have received nearly equal amounts of airtime, the networks have celebrated Walz (62% positive press) and punished Vance (92% negative).
Details:
■ Nets Award Huge Airtime Advantage to Harris: This Media Research Center study looked at all 2024 presidential campaign coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from July 21, the day Biden exited the race, through August 17, including weekends. During those four weeks, the Big Three talked about the race in a total of 194 reports with a combined airtime of 437 minutes.
As far back as 2015, Donald Trump has nearly always bested his competitors when it came to total airtime. During the 2020 general election, for example, the then-President received three times more coverage than challenger Joe Biden. Yet during the past four weeks, the networks have gifted the most airtime to new Democratic candidate Kamala Harris — 221 minutes of coverage on the evening newscasts, or about 66 percent more than Trump (133 minutes).
The networks spent 31 minutes, 27 seconds talking about Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance over the full 28 day period we studied. Following his selection by Harris on August 6, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz received a nearly-identical 31 minutes, 59 seconds of airtime, but during a much shorter time period — just 12 newscasts.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was barely discussed — just four minutes, 44 seconds of coverage across the three networks.
■ Nets Award Harris with Historic Good Press: Campaigns might appreciate getting more airtime than their opponents, but it might be a poisoned gift if most of that coverage is hostile. That was certainly not the case with Harris’s national debut, however.
Looking only at clearly evaluative comments from reporters, anchors and non-partisan sources such as voters and experts, we tallied 57 positive comments about Harris on the Big Three evening newscasts since July 21, vs. just 11 negative statements. That translates to an astonishing 84% positive spin score, an unprecedented level of good press.
Many of the fawning comments came from voters raving about the new Democratic candidate. “We know that she is a powerhouse speaker,” one happy Gen Zer enthused on the July 23 NBC Nightly News. “I haven’t felt this kind of excitement since Obama,” another proclaimed on the August 10 CBS Weekend News.
In 2020, we calculated that the networks supplied Joe Biden with 66% positive coverage during the general election, while the Democrats’ 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton, actually received mostly (79%) negative coverage during that year’s campaign.
Using similar methodology, Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter in 2008 (scroll to page 14) found 68% positive press for Democratic nominee Barack Obama, “the highest...recorded for any nominee over the past six election cycles” by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs. Given the networks’ idolatrous coverage of the past four weeks, it is conceivable Harris’s 2024 coverage could wind up even more positive than Obama’s was sixteen years ago.
While the networks showered Harris with good press, their coverage of former President Trump was as hostile as ever. Over these four weeks, we tallied 86 negative evaluations about Trump vs. just 11 positive statements, for an 89% bad press score. The only candidate who fared worse than Trump was his running mate, J.D. Vance. We tallied 22 negative statements about the Ohio Senator, vs. just two positive comments, for a harshly negative 92% bad press score.
As for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, network viewers heard eight positive statements vs. five negative ones, for a 62% positive press score.
Add it all up, and the networks have granted the combined Democratic ticket of Harris-Walz 82% positive press, while Trump-Vance have faced 90% negative coverage.
■ Networks Skip Harris’s Extreme Liberal Record: Harris is almost certainly the most left-wing nominee of a major party in U.S. history. In 2019, she was named as the most liberal of all U.S. Senators, a grouping that included socialist Bernie Sanders. Yet Harris’s past support for many extreme left-wing ideas, such as the Green New Deal, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and imposing Medicare-for-All in place of private health insurance, were completely ignored during this wave of good press.
Network reporters only twice explained Harris’s ideology to viewers. On July 21, CBS’s Weijia Jiang noted that Harris “has a liberal voting record that could be balanced with a more moderate VP.” Three days later, NBC’s Liz Kreutz identified Harris as a “self-described progressive prosecutor.” ABC’s correspondents and anchors never once thought to identify Harris as a liberal; the only mention of Harris’s ideology on that network came from occasional soundbites from Trump and other Republicans, describing the Vice President as a “radical left lunatic” (Trump on the July 28 World News Tonight).
■ Downplay/Ignore Damaging Democratic Controversies: The networks spent barely any time on controversies that might have marred Harris’s extraordinary media honeymoon. Out of 221 minutes of total Harris coverage, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts spent a grand total of 25 seconds on the idea — always presented as a Republican charge — that the Vice President hadn’t been truthful about Joe Biden’s true condition prior to July 21.
The complaint that Harris was being handed the nomination without receiving a single vote from an ordinary Democratic voter was barely noted, receiving a scant 1 minute, 59 seconds of airtime over four weeks. Harris’s failure to have any meaningful interactions with the press during this entire period — something that should have been a major issue for any news organization — received a paltry 57 seconds of coverage from these three broadcasts combined.
In contrast, the networks spent 8 minutes, 20 seconds of coverage — all of it negative — thumping Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists when he questioned whether Harris used to promote herself as of Indian-American heritage instead of black. And J.D. Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies” running the country was promoted with 11 minutes, 32 seconds of coverage, accounting for more than a third of all of Vance’s coverage during these weeks.
In fact, Vance’s “cat ladies” musings drew nearly twice as much network interest than all of Tim Walz’s dubious claims about his military service (just 6 minutes, 1 second). Walz’s mishandling of the 2020 riots following George Floyd’s death drew even less network interest: just 80 seconds of airtime.
■ Networks Are Portraying Harris as Having Massive Momentum: Our good press/bad press score doesn’t include statements about polls or prognostications, but the networks’ presidential coverage is chock full of such “horse race” assessments. Over the past four weeks, there’s been a tidal wave of positive statements about Harris, generating the impression of massive momentum in favor of the Democrats. Yet a closer look at the data shows the race hasn’t shifted nearly as much as the enthusiastic news coverage would suggest.
From July 21 to August 17, evening news viewers heard 192 positive statements about Harris’s huge crowds, fundraising success, and momentum in the polls, vs. only 12 negative such assessments, for a 94% positive horse race score.
There were far fewer such statements about former President Trump’s campaign standings: 21 positive vs. 28 negative, for a 43% positive/57% negative score.
Yet a check of the average of polls published by RealClearPolitics shows Trump’s overall support has shifted by only a single percentage point, from 47.9% support on July 21 to 46.8% support as of August 17. Looking at the site’s state-by-state assessment, Trump continues to lead in states totaling 219 Electoral College votes, more than Harris. The only shift since July 21: moving Tim Walz’s Minnesota from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat.” Every other battleground state is still considered a toss-up that either side could win, exactly as they stood four weeks ago.
The media’s wildly positive “horse race” coverage of the Harris campaign could create the impression that the Vice President is completely dominating the presidential race. But a calm look at the facts shows that, at least up to this point, the overall state of the race has changed fairly little since the Democrats swapped one candidate for another.
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As the Democratic National Convention begins, the Big Three evening newscasts have delivered Kamala Harris the most positive start to a general election campaign of any presidential nominee in recent memory. Not only is she getting the most coverage, she’s also getting by far the most positive press.
The question is whether the public will be swayed by this extraordinarily lopsided coverage, or will they see this as just more evidence of a partisan news media taking sides.
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METHODOLOGY: To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about each candidate from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.
As we did in 2016 and 2020, we separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning, or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.
