100%! ABC Debate Moderator David Muir Hosts Most Pro-Harris, Left-Wing Newscast
Rich Noyes
September 9th, 2024 9:05 AM
Vice President Kamala Harris will meet former President Donald Trump tomorrow night for a debate hosted by ABC News, and she could not have chosen a friendlier forum for their first encounter. A new study by the Media Research Center finds that, of the Big Three evening newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight — run by debate moderator David Muir — has been the most positive towards Harris and the most hostile to Trump.
MRC analysts reviewed all 100 campaign stories that aired on ABC’s World News Tonight from the day Harris entered the race (July 21) through September 6, including weekends. Our analysts found 25 clearly positive statements about Harris from reporters, anchors, voters or other non-partisan sources, with zero negative statements — none. That computes to a gravity-defying 100% positive spin score for the Vice President.
As for Trump, our analysts found just five clearly positive comments, vs. 66 negative statements, for a dismal 7 percent positive (93% negative) spin score.
Our measure of good press/bad press omits partisan comments, as well as “horse race” assessments about the candidates’ poll standings and prospects. So while viewers of ABC’s World News Tonightcertainly heard negative comments about Harris during these past six-and-a-half weeks, all of them were from Trump, his campaign team, or other Republicans — never from reporters or nonpartisan sources.
At the same time, while our spin score similarly excludes all Democratic soundbites about the Republican nominee, ABC’s reporters and anchors either jumped in to criticize Trump themselves, or broadcast negative comments from non-partisan sources to impart a heavily negative spin to the former President’s coverage.
[For more on the methodology, scroll to the end of this article.]
During these same weeks, both the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News also delivered highly positive coverage for Harris, and mostly negative coverage for Trump, yet not as extreme as we found with ABC’s World News Tonight. Employing the same methodology, coverage of Harris was 94% positive on CBS, and 71% positive on NBC — historically good press, but not as good as the 100% positive press she received on ABC.
As for Trump, his coverage was 77% negative on CBS, and 86% negative on NBC — extremely hostile, but not as dreadful as the whopping 93% negative coverage he received on ABC.
Our study also found other ways that ABC’s flagship newscast aided the Democratic nominee:
■ABC’s World News Tonight never labeled Harris as “liberal.” Both CBS and NBC correspondents confirmed Harris’s ideology early on in her campaign. Back on July 21, CBS’s Weijia Jiang said 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.”
But as of September 4, ABC’s correspondents had yet to call Harris either a “liberal” or a “progressive.”Instead eight stories included brief clips of Republicans (usually former President Trump) calling out Harris’s liberal record. ABC’s reporters and anchors also never criticized Harris’s handling of issues such as the economy or the border.
While there were few criticisms of Harris’s policies and ideology on CBS and NBC, they weren’t entirely absent. “Harris is providing few details on her plans, which one nonpartisan group says will add $1.7 trillion to the deficit,” NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez told viewers back on August 17. “And both Republican and Democratic economists have argued against government price controls.”
■Unlike ABC, both CBS and NBC occasionally showed voters who oppose Harris. Even during the early, highly-positive honeymoon coverage of Harris back in July, evening news viewers occasionally saw voters who didn’t like the Vice President. Reporting in Georgia back on July 30, NBC’s Peter Alexander interviewed a voter, Ben Wilson, who “blames both Biden and Harris for high prices.”
Wilson said he was upset by “everything from gas prices to, you know, eggs, the cost of living, everything.”…
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2024/09/09/100-abc-debate-moderator-david-muir-hosts-most-pro-harris-left-wing