A new MRC study by Rich Noyes of all the evening-news coverage of the Republican presidential race on ABC, CBS, and NBC in 2023 makes it obvious the networks want Trump to be the nominee. He drew almost all of the coverage -- other candidates could barely get noticed. And most of the Trump coverage obsessed over his legal problems, mostly avoiding any national policy issues
Republican voters (and the American people) might have some quaint expectation that network TV anchors and reporters would explain the entire panoply of candidates and issues in the runup to the primaries. There's nothing resembling an old-fashioned approach of reporting with objectivity and policy substance. To summarize the findings:
■ In 2023, Trump received 1,192 minutes of evening news airtime, or 79% of all GOP candidate coverage. Top challengers Ron DeSantis (166 minutes) and Nikki Haley (35 minutes) lagged far behind. It just gets worse from there. Chris Christie was given just 18 minutes of airtime last year. Vivek Ramaswamy was virtually invisible: six minutes all year.
■ The networks trashed Trump with ferociously hostile coverage: 91% negative to just 9% positive. DeSantis and Haley fared better, but neither received more good press than bad. Coverage of DeSantis was 73% negative vs. 27% positive; Haley’s press was split down the middle: 50% negative and 50% positive, but Haley only had ten positive and ten negative evaluations.
■ Campaign trail discussion of substantive issues such as the economy, immigration and abortion were buried under an avalanche of media attention to Trump’s legal cases. The evening newscasts devoted 992 minutes to Trump’s various legal problems in 2023, eight times more than was spent on all policy issues combined (121 minutes). The top four Trump investigations each drew more minutes than the policy total: Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case related to January 6 (290 minutes); Smith’s indictment of Trump for allegedly mishandling government documents (224 minutes); the so-called “hush money” case brought by Manhattan’s Democratic D.A., Alvin Bragg (172 minutes); and the Georgia election case brought by Democratic D.A. Fani Willis (132 minutes).
■ The most heavily-covered policy issue was race relations (29 minutes, mostly focusing on DeSantis fighting wokeness in Florida). Next came abortion (17 minutes), immigration (14 minutes), the war in Ukraine (7 minutes), and the economy (7 minutes). To repeat: the networks gave us almost 1,000 minutes on Trump's legal matters, versus seven minutes on Biden's economic management as a campaign issue. How can this be taken seriously as "news judgment"?
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