No Obama Treatment for Them: MRC Study Finds Morning TV Hits GOP Candidates With Hostile Liberal Agenda
For most Americans, the 2012 presidential campaign will be experienced on television, and voters will evaluate the candidates based on their performances at televised debates, daily news coverage, and in long-form interviews. Even with all of the changes in the media landscape over past several years, the most-watched regular forums for candidate interviews are the broadcast network morning news programs — NBC’s Today , ABC’s Good Morning America , and CBS’s The Early Show , with a combined weekday audience of more than 13 million as of the second quarter of 2011. But how fairly are those broadcasts treating the candidates, and how well are the network morning show hosts serving Republican primary voters who must decide which candidate will oppose President Obama next fall? To find out, the MRC’s Geoffrey Dickens and I analyzed all 53 weekday morning show interviews with either potential or declared Republican candidates from January 1 through September 15, and compared the results with our study of the same programs’ treatment of the Democratic candidates during the same time period from four years ago. As might be expected, most of the more than 400 questions posed to the Republican candidates this year had to do with early campaign strategy and tactics and basic biographical details. But our analysts counted 98 “ideological questions” — policy-based questions that incorporated either a liberal or conservative premise.
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on September 22, 2011. Filed under