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.
The final Media Research Center (MRC) study released last week showed evaluative coverage of Harris — excluding “horse race” assessments — on ABC, CBS and NBC was 78% positive vs. 22% negative. For Trump, those numbers were flipped: just 15% positive press, vs. 85% negative coverage. Subtracting Trump’s positive press from Harris’s, the advantage to the Democratic nominee was 63 points, the greatest in the modern media age. [See methodology explanation at the end of this article.]
The previous worst display of imbalanced…
