If the tone of media coverage decided the election, it would be a landslide for Kamala Harris. The media have never more energetically taken a side for a candidate. This could be happening because:
(A) Trump is considered to be the most horrible person ever.
(B) Kamala is the most horrible Democrat nominee in modern times, and the media need to compensate for it.
MRC founder and president Brent Bozell and I discussed the latest MRC studies proving the worst campaign bias we've ever documented, not only on TV news, but even on TV "comedy" shows. It's a "Brent Bozell Show" crossover episode.
It's not remarkable that the latest Rich Noyes study of evening-news shows found Donald Trump's coverage has been 85 percent negative. What's remarkable is that Kamala's coverage is 78 percent positive. It's historic -- in the worst way. There has never been network news that looked and sounded more like campaign advertising.
Of the 753 minutes of evening news airtime devoted to Trump since July 21, nearly one-third (230 minutes, or 31%) has been about personal controversies. This compares to barely five percent of Harris’s airtime (28 minutes, out of a total 583 minutes of coverage) spent on similar topics. Just like his presidency, they always create scandals out of things Trump says. Nothing Kamala says is controversial, and they skip all of the personal scandals they could cover -- allegations of plagiarism in her 2009 book, allegations her husband brutally slapped an ex-girlfriend, and how she conspired to hide President Biden's mental decline.
Naturally, then, Gallup reported that they found only a meager 31% of Americans — and just 12% of Republicans — said they had either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media’s ability to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
Thern there is Alex Christy's late-night comedy study: The jokes about the presidential contenders looks like a landslide: 98 percent of the jokes are about Trump and two percent for Harris. And the jokes are not soft Johnny Carson kidding. When John Kelly claimed Trump wants generals like Hitler's, the comedians lectured about it. Jimmy Fallon, the softest of the bunch, joked: "This is the first election where reporters have to ask, 'Who'd you root for when you watched Saving Private Ryan?'"
Will all this network tilt matter? Axios said "the big media era is over," especially under 35: "Top executives and officials tell us that reaching people ages 35 and under with any message — or even major event — is almost impossible. Or they've seen an eight-second clip with no context, so they have a very different understanding of what happened than someone who saw a mainstream report."
Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For "The Brent Bozell Show" episode on video, click here on Rumble or on YouTube.
