The MRC study on media coverage of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump shouldn’t surprise anyone.
This year, the center researched all ABC, CBS, and NBC presidential coverage.
I noticed the biased coverage when I was a leftist. It keeps getting worse:
Since Joe Biden exited the 2024 presidential race four weeks ago, the liberal networks have delivered an unprecedented boost of positive publicity to his successor in the race, Vice President Kamala Harris. Not only has Harris received 66% more airtime than former President Donald Trump, but the spin of Harris’s coverage has been more positive (84%) than any other major party nominee, even as Trump’s coverage has been nearly entirely hostile (89% negative).As always, our calculation of spin omits so-called “horse race” assessments (see methodology statement below), but a separate count shows those statements have also favored Harris by a whopping margin (94% positive, vs. just 43% positive for Trump). At the same time, the network coverage has virtually eliminated any discussion of the strident left-wing positions Harris took as Senator or during her 2020 presidential campaign. And while Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance and his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, have received nearly equal amounts of airtime, the networks have celebrated Walz (62% positive press) and punished Vance (92% negative).
In 2020, the media gave Trump three times more coverage than Joe Biden.
However, between July 21, when Biden dropped out, and August 17, the Big Three gave Harris 66% more coverage than Trump.
The stats include 57 positive comments and 11 negative statements. That’s 84% on the positive side.
Trump? 89% negative comments and 11% positive comments. That’s an 89% terrible press score.
The media has given JD Vance 22 negative and only two positive comments. That’s a whopping 92% lousy press score!
Tim Walz has a 62% positive press score, with eight positive remarks and five negative ones.
Get this.
The MRC also found out that 70% of the voters don’t know about Harris’s radical policies.
That’s not a shock either since the media avoids talking about her far-left ideas:
Harris is almost certainly the most left-wing nominee of a major party in U.S. history. In 2019, she was named as the most liberal of all U.S. Senators, a grouping that included socialist Bernie Sanders. Yet Harris’s past support for many extreme left-wing ideas, such as the Green New Deal, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and imposing Medicare-for-All in place of private health insurance, were completely ignored during this wave of good press.Network reporters only twice explained Harris’s ideology to viewers. On July 21, CBS’s Weijia Jiang noted that Harris “has a liberal voting record that could be balanced with a more moderate VP.” Three days later, NBC’s Liz Kreutz identified Harris as a “self-described progressive prosecutor.” ABC’s correspondents and anchors never once thought to identify Harris as a liberal; the only mention of Harris’s ideology on that network came from occasional soundbites from Trump and other Republicans, describing the Vice President as a “radical left lunatic” (Trump on the July 28 World News Tonight).
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