Anti-Trump and Anti-GOP: How TV News Is Spinning the Midterms

With just one week to go before the 2018 midterm elections, the broadcast networks are heavily spinning their campaign coverage against the Republicans, even as President Trump’s campaign activities have received more airtime than all of the individual Senate, House, and gubernatorial contests combined.

Not only was network coverage of Republicans far more hostile (88% negative) than that meted out to Democrats (53% negative), but we found nearly ten times more negative statements about Republicans and President Trump (97) than all of the Democratic candidates combined (10).

In fact, coverage of the entire field of Democratic candidates would have been 67 percent positive if it hadn’t been for negative comments in stories about Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test.

For this report, MRC analysts looked at all stories that mentioned the midterm elections on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from September 1 through October 26. During those eight weeks, the networks generated 130 minutes of midterm coverage, most of which (78 minutes, or 60%) has aired in the final two weeks of our study (October 13-26).

Our analysts found a combined 132 stories that either focused on the midterms or mentioned them as part of story on another topic (such as the Kavanaugh confirmation battle). Four years ago, when Republicans were poised to take full control of Congress, those same networks aired barely one-fourth as many stories (35) during a similar time period.

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