Viewers of ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts saw 150 times more negative comments about President Trump than Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, according to the Media Research Center.
MRC Research Director Rich Noyes wrote at the organization’s Newsbusters site that the analysis reviewed every mention of Trump and Biden from June 1 through July 31, including weekends.
The programs reviewed were ABC’s “World News Tonight,”
“CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News.”
Noyes said he’s been studying the news media and elections for more than 35 years, and “there’s never been anything like” the bias he saw.
The programs focused 512 minutes of airtime on the president, nine times as much as the 58 minutes given Biden.
“The extra airtime devoted to Trump consisted almost entirely of anchors and reporters criticizing the president. During these two months, our analysts documented 668 evaluative statements about the president, 95 percent of which (634) were negative, vs. a mere five percent (34) that were positive. Using the same methodology … we found very few evaluative statements about Joe Biden — just a dozen, two-thirds of which (67%) were positive,” Noyes wrote.
“Do the math, and viewers heard 150 TIMES more negative comments about Trump than Biden. That’s not news reporting — that’s a negative advertising campaign in action.”
A chart by MRC called it the “most biased campaign coverage in history.”
“These networks chose to aim most of their attention and nearly all of their negative coverage on Trump, so Biden escaped any scrutiny of his left-wing policy positions, past job performance or character,” the report said.
“If you consider the evening newscasts a reliable gauge of the liberal media at large (cable news, big newspapers, etc.), it means Biden has enjoyed an army of so-called journalists conducting a massive negative information campaign against his opponent, while he is sheltered from any scrutiny.”
Noyes noted that reports on allegations from former staffer Tara Reade that Biden sexually assaulted her in the 1990s “completely disappeared from his evening news coverage in June and July.”
Further, Biden’s proposals, “which by his own admission would take his administration farther to the Left than the very liberal Obama administration — received a meager 5 minutes, 22 seconds of airtime.”
Not one second of air time was devoted to critical analysis of Biden’s plans, the report said.
There were no mentions of “left-wing” and no explanation of how Biden would raise the $4 trillion in new taxes he proposes. Much of the coverage of Biden was devoted to his criticism of Trump.
MRC said: “No presidential candidate — not even Barack Obama in 2008 — has ever been on the receiving end of such a wide array of media favors. (While Obama received highly positive coverage, there was no massive media effort to destroy his GOP opponent, Senator John McCain.) While the former vice president sits snugly in his basement before his nomination later this week, the entire liberal ‘news’ media complex have spent the summer on the attack against his opponent, even as they refuse to report anything negative about Biden himself.”
