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One easy demonstration of broadcast network bias is their “news” coverage of political books, especially what’s called the “tell-all” book. They adore Trump “tell-alls,” and can’t abide those volumes about Democrats. This bias first emerges at book publishers. Democrats are rarely encouraged to write “tell-alls” because it damages the party’s brand.
Back in 2018, ABC, CBS, and NBC awarded more than two hours and 20 minutes of breathless coverage to Michael Wolff in one week over his anti-Trump book “Fire and Fury.” On NBC’s “Today,” co-host Savannah Guthrie nudged Wolff on Trump’s mental fitness. “One of the overarching themes is that, according to your reporting, everyone around the President – senior advisers, family members, every single one of them – questions his intelligence and fitness for office.”
Wolff eagerly underlined it: “Let me put a marker in the sand here: 100 percent of the people around him.”
BROADCAST BIAS: NETWORKS OOZE WITH SYMPATHY TO ANYONE WHO OPPOSES TRUMP
In August of 2018, they broke out the promotion machine again for former “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault-Newman and her tell-all book “Unhinged.” ABC, CBS, and NBC rolled out 93 minutes of network coverage, as the author claimed from her time with Trump outside and inside the White House that he was a “racist” who had used the “N-word.” NBC gave it the most time, perhaps doing penance for making Trump a national star on “The Apprentice.” ABC’s “Good Morning America” even hyped Omarosa’s claim that Trump wanted to “start a race war.”
These books came out in Trump’s second year in office. The new Biden “tell-all” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson came out months after President Biden left the White House. When the first previews of the book emerged in The New Yorker and Axios, where we learned Biden didn’t recognize actor George Clooney at a 2024 fundraiser and Biden aides pondered putting him in a wheelchair after the election, only NBC offered a short report summarizing the scoops. ABC, CBS, and PBS ignored it.
The pattern continued. Before the book came out on Tuesday, only NBC spent more than a minute on the book’s findings on their morning and evening newscasts. ABC and CBS combined didn’t even reach a full minute of coverage. “PBS News Hour” was the worst of the bunch. They aired absolutely no discussion of anything revealed in the book (although they did briefly allude to the existence of “a book.”)
Of the Big Three, only CBS aired an interview with the authors. NPR aired interviews starting on Monday, and PBS followed on Thursday. “CBS Mornings” host Gayle King raised the obvious question of timing: “Why didn’t you share it before, as soon as you got it, as opposed to gathering all the information then putting it out in a book that you will undoubtedly profit from?”
Tapper claimed they would have broken these scoops if they had found them in real time. But it’s also true that Democrats felt freer after they lost the White House to tentatively (mostly anonymously) acknowledge to these authors they covered up or downplayed Biden’s failings – despite large numbers of Americans saying Biden was too old to serve a second term.
Sadly, NBC was among the broadcast TV networks in playing a soundbite of audio from the just-released tapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s questioning of President Biden from October 2023, a sentence of Biden not remembering when he was vice president. (NPR’s “Fresh Air” also ran a Hur snippet in their Tapper interview.)
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This matches how the networks avoided Hur before he decided not to indict Biden. From February 1 through November 20 in 2023, the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) could only muster four minutes and 52 seconds of overall coverage of Hur – combined. Almost all of that time was on ABC. By contrast, we counted 2,092 minutes of coverage of Trump and alleged Russian collusion from January 20, 2017 through December, 2018. That’s a dramatic contrast.
While Tapper and Thompson expressed regrets in several interviews about how they were too gentle on Biden before this book and that conservative media were “right” to drive this issue during Biden’s presidency, the networks weren’t anything like Megyn Kelly in pressing that point of media spin. They didn’t just engage in neglect of Biden’s decline. They aggressively pushed the White House line that it was fringy MAGA talking points to question Biden’s fitness.
Some TV journalists might publicly state “gee, we need to do better in the future” after this debacle. Some will use this to enhance the double standard, like they learned to be fierce in questioning President Trump’s health disclosures. But they certainly displayed that during Trump’s first term.
After the Tapper-Thompson parade ends, the betting money should be placed on the networks returning to their natural method, repeating the Democrat message of the day without seriously questioning it.
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