Bias by Omission

The shocking discovery of a tree stand outside the Palm Beach International Airport, with a clear line of sight to where President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One, was at or near the top of the ABC and NBC Sunday Night Newscasts. This was not the case at CBS, amid some questionable editorial choices.

During a lengthy interview on the most recent broadcast of ABC’s Sunday political affairs show This Week, host Jon Karl tried to press Speaker Mike Johnson on the issue of presidential clemencies. Johnson instead took Karl to school, reminding him about other, more inconvenient recent presidential abuses of the clemency power. 

New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis blamed Republicans for the supposed suppression of free speech on campus lately – as in, why aren’t pro-Hamas campus activists able to disrupt classes, occupy buildings, and harass Jewish students -- in Tuesday’s “What Happened to Campus Activism Against the War in Gaza?” That war in Gaza was of course started by Hamas when they invaded…

After weeks ducking the murderous text messages sent by Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, the legacy media appear to have finally found a text scandal they like. The Young Republicans’ text scandal as broken by Politico has given the legacy news the cover it needs.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, CBS’s flagship morning and evening newscasts — CBS Mornings and the CBS Evening News — refused to cover the horrifying revelation from the Department of Homeland Security that Mexican drug cartels have put bounties on the heads of federal law enforcement and Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officers with upwards of $50,000 for…

On Monday and Tuesday, brutal footage emerged of Hamas terrorists carrying out public executions of those they claim were disloyal and “collaborators with Israel,” just hours after the ceasefire went into effect as part of President Trump’s historic regional peace deal. Between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, ABC completely omitted this disturbing turn from their flagship evening and…

Once again, the New York Times is coming to the defense of the ghouls who celebrated the assassination of conservative Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk. And again left unmentioned: The left cancelling people’s reputations and getting them fired over far less offensive things during the Covid and BLM-fueled hysteria of 2020, including opinion editors at The Times.

Another Sunday has passed, and with it another cycle of omissive bias from the major legacy media political affairs shows. Two major political stories went undiscussed- both the ongoing fallout over the Jay Jones text scandal currently roiling the Virginia gubernatorial election, and the arrest of the Red Mass bomber exactly one week ago.

The New York Times desperately tried to downplay the left-wing political unrest and violence in Portland, OR, generated by the domestic terrorists of Antifa. First it was the paper’s benighted columnist Nicholas Kristof embarrassing himself on X with a sarcastic video post from “the perilous front lines” of Portland. On Saturday the Times argued the threat of Antifa was a…

You know that a public statement from a Democrat elected official is bad when the media steps in and tries to firefight potential public backlash. Such is the case with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who gets five-alarm firefighting from NBC after saying that “every day gets worse for us.”

On Tuesday, clips went viral on X of former Congresswoman Katie Porter (D-CA) — who’s running to become governor of California — pitching an utterly bizarre tantrum after CBS News Sacramento’s Julie Watts asked Porter if she had planned to seek to win the votes of Californians who voted for President Trump.

We at the Media Research Center have long argued that one of the most insidious forms of media bias is bias by omission: the exclusion of stories, or of key items within stories, that run counter to the ongoing media narrative. We cover those omissions as they happen, but they are usually limited to one high-profile story. But last night’s legacy evening news omitted THREE major items.

It happened again: an explosive report drops detailing the breadth, width and scope of the extent to which the government was weaponized against conservatives. And again, the legacy media are nowhere to be found.

In an embarrassing interview, CBS’s Margaret Brennan sat passively as Illinois Democrat Senator Tammy Duckworth repeated what is now known as the Zip-Tie Hoax: the debunked claim that children were zip-tied during ICE raids in Chicago. Additionally, Duckworth was allowed to incite further violence against ICE with her incendiary claim that they engage in “Gestapo tactics.”