Media Reality Check

When President-elect Donald Trump announced that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, would be taking an advisory role in the White House, all three broadcast evening news shows raised concerns about “nepotism,” with each one specifically using that word. But, on January 25, 1993, when President Bill Clinton appointed his wife to lead a health care task force, the broadcast networks praised the…

With the Democratic Party defeated, ObamaCare set for repeal, and incoming President Donald Trump poised to revoke a host of his executive orders, Obama’s actual legacy will likely fall far short of what his media fan club once imagined. But one aspect of his place in history seems secure: Barack Obama has been the lucky recipient of more biased, positive “news” media coverage than any other…

On Friday, NBC Today show co-host Matt Lauer celebrated his 20th anniversary anchoring the network morning show. Since joining the program on January 6, 1997, Lauer’s liberal bias has routinely seeped into his news coverage. From repeatedly excusing Bill Clinton’s sex scandals as mere “peccadillos” to bashing George W. Bush’s “controversial” presidency to gushing over Barack Obama as a “savior”…

The networks treat accusations of Russian hacking very differently when they can use it as an angle to bash Trump. When Russian cyber criminals were accused by intelligence agencies of hacking the emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, the networks devoted 58 minutes, 47 seconds to these allegations since December 12.

CNN President Jeff Zucker went on the defensive Wednesday night, when a room full of campaign surrogates called him out for his network’s lopsided campaign coverage. However, as a surrogate for a former GOP candidate pointed out, the MRC has proven that CNN's track record this campaign season has been anything but defensible.

When Jill Stein was the Green Party’s candidate for U.S. president, the networks only gave her 36 seconds of coverage. However, as soon as she launched a campaign to contest the presidential election and demand a recount of ballots in several key states, the evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC managed to find 7 minutes and 26 seconds of coverage for her in just four days.

Fidel Castro’s communist regime executed hundreds of political opponents and drove tens of thousands more into exile; hundreds of dissidents today languish in Cuban prisons. Yet liberals in the U.S. media — who rightly condemned such abuses when perpetrated by dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet — inexplicably remain enchanted with Castro and his socialist revolution. For almost 30 years,…

The liberal media establishment has spent the past 25 years celebrating Clinton as an “icon of American womanhood,” while fiercely attacking those who would challenge her ethics. Far from impeding Hillary Clinton’s career with critical coverage, the establishment media have enabled her political rise with what amounts to a 25-year long infomercial on her behalf: admiring testimonials about her…

Ever since it was announced, on Friday, that the FBI was pursuing new leads into the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server scandal, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks have gone into attack mode against James Comey, turning what should be a scandal about Clinton into a smear against the FBI director. 

Despite skyrocketing premiums, major insurance companies backing out, and one state exchange after another failing, in all of 2016, the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC have only devoted 10 minutes and 21 seconds combined to ObamaCare failures. Until Bill Clinton called the Affordable Care Act “this crazy system” on October 3, ABC and NBC hadn’t covered any ObamaCare news in 2016 at…

While there is no shortage of negative coverage of Donald Trump, the broadcast networks continue to bury, ignore or downplay negative news about Hillary Clinton. As NewsBusters has pointed out before, even when the broadcast networks cover the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, they pick and choose which released emails to cover. Many emails that…

In the twelve weeks since the party conventions concluded in late July, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has received significantly more broadcast network news coverage than his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but nearly all of that coverage (91%) has been hostile, according to a new study by the Media Research Center (MRC). The networks spent far more airtime focusing on the…

With just three weeks to go, major newspapers (with a circulation of at least 50,000) are walloping Donald Trump in their official endorsements, favoring Hillary Clinton by a count of 68 to zero. Out of a total of 82 newspapers that have offered an editorial on who their readers should vote for, 68 (83 percent) of them have endorsed Hillary Clinton, five (6 percent) recommended Libertarian Party…

From Friday evening to Thursday morning, the morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated 4 hours and 13 minutes to discussing the recent allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, not only has the continual release of the WikiLeaks emails from top Hillary staff gotten a comparatively puny 36 minutes of coverage during this same time period,…