One theme of Hillary Clinton’s book tour is that news media bias helped tip the election in favor of Donald Trump. “I personally believe that our press, which is such an essential part of our country, our democracy, has to take some hard look at how it covered what was the first reality TV candidate,” Clinton lectured NBC’s Matt Lauer on Wednesday.
The belief that Clinton’s personal e-mail scandal was given more coverage than Trump’s controversies has been a common complaint since November, but it’s just not true. Last year, MRC analysts looked at all campaign coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts — the best proxy for a manageable examination of all campaign news from important national sources.
Looking at the entire campaign year (January 1 to November 7), the broadcast evening newscasts spent much more time on Trump’s campaign (2,437 minutes of airtime) than Clinton’s (1,504). But a much greater share of Trump’s coverage was devoted to embarrassing controversies (1,032 minutes, or more than 42% of his total airtime) than on similar stories involving Clinton (488 minutes, or 32% of her airtime).
The networks spent 245 minutes on Clinton’s e-mail scandal, more than any individual Trump controversy, and about one-sixth of her total coverage. But the large number of Trump controversies given heavy coverage by the networks collectively dwarfed coverage of her e-mails.– READ MORE
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