It wasn’t for lack of money for media publicity that Kamala Harris lost the election in historic numbers.
Her campaign reportedly raised more than $1 billion, plus likely received multiples of that amount in free promotions from major politically aligned print and television news networks and favorable reporting search engine preferences including Google.
Donald Trump got the opposite legacy media treatment to drag his support down. They blatantly misrepresented his statements through contextual omissions and failed to source or fact-check derogatory claims during hostile interviews; they lobbed Harris softball questions enabling characteristically evasive word salad responses.
For reference, overall, a 2024 Pew Research study revealed that about two-thirds of U.S. adults at least sometimes get news on digital devices (websites, apps and search engines), with a little more than half (54%) from social media, one-third from TV, and just 26% often or sometimes in print form, the lowest number their surveys have ever recorded.
Survey analyses of news coverage by the Big 3 television networks by the Media Research Center (MRC) characterized this 2024 presidential campaign bias favoring Harris over Trump as “the most lopsided in history.”
According to MRC, “Since July, ABC, CBS and NBC have treated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris to 78% positive coverage, while these same networks have pummeled former Republican President Donald Trump with 85% negative coverage.”
MRC Contributing Editor Rich Noyes observes that whereas the bias is likely not surprising, “the negative-positive spread was bigger than in the past two elections, which also featured Trump as the GOP nominee.”
In 2016, both Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received mostly negative coverage, 91% and 79% respectively, while in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden was treated to 66% positive coverage and Trump to 92% negative coverage.
Since this past July, Noyes notes, evening news programs of the Big 3 “have swamped their audiences with more than 230 minutes of airtime — virtually all of it negative — about an array of personal controversies surrounding the former president yet provided extremely light coverage or altogether ignored many controversies involving Vice President Harris.”
“Instead, Noyes added, “Harris’s coverage has been larded with enthusiastic quotes from pro-Harris voters, creating a positive ‘vibe’ for the Democrat even as network reporters criticize Trump themselves.”
Conservative watchdog MRC found that of 753 minutes of evening news airtime devoted to Trump since July 21, nearly one-third (31%) has been about personal scandals and controversies, whereas virtually nothing Harris has said was regarded controversial.
For example, they skipped over “allegations of plagiarism in her 2009 book, allegations her husband brutally slapped an ex-girlfriend, and how she conspired to hide President Biden's mental decline.”
Regarding print “journalism,” consider some recent New York Times headline features such as “Harris Packs Star Power as Trump Rails Over Legal Trouble,” and “Sweeping Raids and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s Immigration Plans,” and possibly one of the most ironic of all, “As Election Looms, Justice Dept. Tries to Steer Clear of Politics.”
As the liberal flagship paper’s former editorial page editor wrote in the Economist magazine last year, “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”
The Washington Post is no more objective, running a one-sided fact check that gave four “Pinocchios” to a Trump ad accurately saying that V.P Harris “supports EV mandates, killing Michigan jobs.”
That campaign statement was clearly true with proposed EPA rules requiring carmakers to transition to EVs at a time when Michigan is hemorrhaging auto and parts jobs largely for that reason.
Commenting on Fox News Digital, MRC founder Brent Bozell advised viewers not to trust Google searches for objective information either.
MRC Free Speech America researchers compared Sept. 6 search results of two separate Google searches: "Donald Trump presidential race 2024" and "Kamala Harris presidential race 2024," to determine where each would position each candidate’s presidential website.
The results were different, starkly favoring Harris.
Recapping the findings, MRC Free Speech America associate editor Gabriela Pariseau wrote: "In the past, Google buried the campaign websites of Republican candidates. Now the search giant very clearly pads its search results about political candidates with leftist legacy news articles, many of which are hostile to Republicans and either neutral or favorable toward Democrats."
Pariseau added, "Readers will have to sift through the biased news before they even see the organic results of their searches, let alone a candidate’s website."
There’s little wonder that an October Gallup survey concluded that trust in the media has hit a record low (31%), principally owing to a decline in confidence by independents and Republicans.
Only 12% of Republicans said they had either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the media’s ability to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
Donald Trump has repeatedly attributed this broad distrust to a “fake media.”
In any case, he fought them, and while they’re temporarily wounded but not dead, both he and predominate voter common sense won.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.