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100%! ABC Airs TV’s Most Pro-Harris, Anti-Trump Evening Newscast
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 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 Tonight certainly 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.”
More recently, Nightly News viewers on September 4 saw a voter in New Hampshire declaring his preference for Trump: “Harris will be four more years of misery.”
Yet no such voters were ever included in ABC’s evening news coverage, although they seemed to have no objection to showing pro-Harris voters, such as the fangirl who popped up on the August 18 World News Tonight: “We’re so excited about the Harris/Walz ticket and the hope and the joy.”
CBS and NBC both found critics of Harris’s tenure as a prosecutor. “Some progressives called out Harris for being too tough on crime, but conservatives criticized her for being too lenient,” CBS’s Nikole Killion told viewers in an August 22 profile of the new Democratic nominee. No such criticism — from either the right or the left — was shown on ABC’s World News Tonight.
■ Promoting Trump’s controversies, hiding Harris’s. Back on August 3, both CBS and NBC briefly let their viewers know that Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, had committed adultery during his first marriage. Correspondent Natalie Brand explained on the CBS Weekend News: “Emhoff in a statement obtained by CBS News said that during his first marriage, he went through some tough times on account of his actions and took responsibility in the years since.”
Neither network treated Emhoff’s transgression as a big deal, yet ABC didn’t offer up even a second of coverage to this negative story about the Vice President’s husband. Instead, ABC’s Selina Wang that night explained how Harris had “officially lock[ed] up enough votes to become the presumptive Democratic nominee,” and talked about her ongoing search for a running mate.
World News Tonight certainly wasn’t shy about giving oxygen to what they presented as Trump controversies. The network talked about Trump’s comment questioning Harris’s race in four different stories, for a combined 3 minutes, 48 seconds of coverage. ABC offered up three different stories (3 minutes, 30 seconds) talking about the kerfuffle following Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate those killed in the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And the network hit Trump on his comments contrasting the Medal of Honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on two different nights, tallying up to a total of three minutes, 14 seconds of coverage. “Tonight, Trump still facing criticism....” ABC’s Rachel Scott touted on August 19, three full days after her newscast’s initial coverage of the remark.
ABC provided no such scrutiny for Harris’s flubs. Prior to the Vice President’s August 29 interview with CNN, ABC had only allowed six seconds to the idea that she was ducking tough questions. World News Tonight devoted less than a minute of airtime (59 seconds) to the fact that Harris became the Democratic nominee without facing voters in any primary or caucus.
Yet on eight different occasions, the network toasted the “historic” nature of Harris as the “first black woman and first Asian American,” as correspondent Selina Wang celebrated back on July 21.
“The final night of the Democratic National Convention, and it will be an historic one,” ABC’s David Muir echoed a month later, on August 22. “Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black woman and Asian American set to accept a major party’s nomination for President.”
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Tomorrow night’s debate will be moderated by David Muir, the weekday anchor of World News Tonight, and Linsey Davis, who anchors the Sunday edition of the same broadcast. Muir holds the title of “Managing Editor,” which means he can review all of the field reports used on his newscast and assure that they are fair to both sides.
Based on the record of the past six and a half weeks, Muir’s newscast could hardly be more one-sided in its approach to the 2024 presidential campaign. It does not augur well for the potential fairness of tomorrow’s debate.
METHODOLOGY: To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about each candidate from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.
As we did in 2016 and 2020, we separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning, or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.
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