The Media Research Center’s new study on the Big Three’s shutdown coverage spin reveals a staggering degree of Democrat bias.
MRC’s new study is a follow-up to their pre-shutdown bias analysis, which found ABC, CBS, and NBC “almost universally pinning the blame on congressional Republicans.” But Thursday's study of the two weeks of shutdown coverage reveals the Big Three stooping to a new low.
As MRC's Research Director Rich Noyes states, the 20 million viewers who tuned in to the Big Three’s evening newscasts heard “a version of the shutdown story that could easily have emanated from Barack Obama’s own White House.”
The broadcast networks invariably blamed Republicans for the impasse; spotlighted dozens of examples of how Americans were being victimized; and ran scores of soundbites from furloughed federal workers and others harmed by the shutdown — even as they ignored examples of how the Obama administration and Senate Democrats were working to make the shutdown as painful as possible.
The MRC analysts who monitored the Big Three’s news from the first day of shutdown (Oct. 1) to the final deal (Oct. 15), found a shameless degree of Democrat bias:
Of the 124 full stories and brief items about the shutdown or the pending debt ceiling deadline, 41 blamed Republicans or conservatives for the impasse, 17 blamed both sides, and none specifically blamed Democrats.
“Media spin” doesn’t quite do an imbalance of 41 to 0 justice. "Journalistic malpractice" is closer to the truth.
The 41 blame-the-Republicans stories is not the only issue, of course. It’s also all the obvious angles ignored by the networks:
Virtually absent from the coverage was any questioning of the Obama administration's tactics in implementing the shutdown. Eight stories talked about the barricading of the open-air World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., a site that is normally accessible 24 hours a day. None of the networks questioned why that particular memorial needed to be barricaded.
Like our increasingly obsequious White House press corps, the Big Three refuse to ask the hard questions, allowing the Obama administration to operate without fear of accountability.
As Noyes argues, with such blatantly biased coverage, no wonder the polls grew dim for the GOP.
As the shutdown neared its end, the networks’ polls found the American public more critical of the GOP than either Democrats or the White House. While some blame can perhaps be assigned to Republicans’ lack of a unified conservative message, the incessant drumbeat of hostile, and slanted, media coverage surely took its toll as well.
