Vice President Kamala Harris was carried to Election Day with the biggest and most favorable media bias in history, according to the final tally by the Media Research Center.
The press watchdog said the big three networks that dominated TV coverage ended up giving her coverage that was 78% positive to just 15% positive for former President Donald Trump. That 63-point advantage is the biggest in history and about three times what 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry had over former President George W. Bush.
“It’s finally over, and the 2024 presidential campaign made history in at least one ignominious respect: Broadcast evening news coverage of the candidates was the most wildly imbalanced in history, favoring Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris over former Republican President Donald Trump by the greatest margin ever recorded,” MRC’s Rich Noyes said in his report on Tuesday.
This year’s coverage imbalance was slightly worse than in 2020, when TV news broke all records in providing President Joe Biden a 58-point advantage.
The bias was hard to miss this year. Near the end of the campaign, for example, social media exploded with examples, such as the efforts by CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell to portray Harris as joyful and smart and Trump as dark and revenge-obsessed.
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The network coverage echoed the legacy print media’s coverage of the race, as well as cable TV news.
Noyes scolded the media’s bias. “Journalists should not be proud that their coverage has invariably tipped to the Democrats in presidential elections since 1992. They should be distressed that this partisan tilt has grown much wider over the years. And it is absolutely scandalous that this year’s election, the closest ever in preelection polls, should have the most preposterously lopsided coverage of all,” he wrote.