Network 'News Judgment' Depends on Who Benefits!

Tim Graham on Oct 4, 2024

It's late in the campaign, so the network "news" programs often seem indistinguishable from the cascade of negative campaign ads that air around the harrumphing anchormen and anchorwomen.

Rich Noyes at NewsBusters reported that the tone of coverage about the Trump-Vance ticket (excluding statements by politicians) from July 21 to Sept. 27 was 96% negative on ABC, 81% negative on CBS, and 87% negative on NBC.

By contrast, the coverage of the Harris-Walz ticket was 97% positive on ABC, 85% positive on CBS, and 65% positive on NBC.

Bias by omission is part of that math. Since the study came out, London's Daily Mail offered an anonymous accuser who claimed she was a girlfriend of Vice President Kamala Harris' husband Doug Emhoff when he violently slapped her face in 2012 after an event at the Cannes Film Festival in France. An allegation like that should have a name and a face before it becomes a big story. (Emhoff denied it.) ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR and PBS skipped it.

But network "news judgment" depends on who benefits. On Halloween night in 2011, Politico reported that when then-Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain headed the National Restaurant Association, it settled two sexual harassment lawsuits. Citing unnamed sources, Politico reported two unnamed women alleged Cain was guilty of conversations "of a sexually suggestive nature."

The networks leaped on that underbaked, anonymously sourced story on the black conservative. Laugh now at NBC's Matt Lauer crowing Cain was "finding out the hard way about the attention that goes along with being a front-runner." He meant "Republican front-runner." George Stephanopoulos leapt on the story as a "bombshell blast," a shameless move for the "ruin the bimbo" specialist.

In the first week of the Cain scandal, ABC, CBS and NBC combined for 84 stories on the allegations against Cain before the media would or could identify an accuser with a name or a face.

Sometimes the accusers are named. Consider Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's wildest accuser during his confirmation battle in 2018, Julie Swetnick, who alleged that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she was gang-raped. The networks fdidn't hold back on that. Instead, we heard dopey disclaimers, like "NBC News has not independently corroborated Swetnick's claims." They can't do a Democratic scandal story (like Hunter Biden's laptop) because "we have to independently corroborate it."

In 2020, when former Biden aide Tara Reade alleged that President Joe Biden sexually assaulted her inside the Capitol, The New York Times and Washington Post published lengthy stories investigating the charge. But ABC and NBC couldn't spend a single second on it. CBS aired it for 63 seconds.

This pattern isn't just about sex scandals. On Sept. 27, Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed that it estimates there are roughly 13,000 noncitizen murderers running loose in the country, and nearly 16,000 noncitizens convicted of sexual assault. "NBC Nightly News" provided a sentence. ABC, CBS, NPR and PBS haven't located it.

Now fast forward to Oct. 2, when Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed special counsel Jack Smith's 165-page brief about former President Donald Trump's actions to deny the 2020 election results and reactions to the Jan. 6 riot. ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR and PBS combined for more than 38 breathless minutes on that "bombshell."

Excluding Democratic voters who love this partisan tilt, naive swing voters tuning into these leftist "legacy" networks are served an amazingly tilted menu of information and misinformation. Stories that could damage the GOP don't have to be confirmed. They just have to be exploited. We consider this shameless partisan propaganda. They consider it "saving democracy."

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.