Four years ago, TV’s coverage of the midterm elections hammered Republican candidates with 88 percent negative spin and spared Democrats similar bad press. Despite Democrats being in control of the White House, both chambers of Congress and the White House, a Media Research Center study of ABC and CBS evening newscasts found that Republicans are getting negative coverage (87% negative) this year while Democrats, including the President, are receiving far less attention than the party that is out of power.
Team Blue has another advantage: The top topics in these campaign stories — GOP controversies and abortion rights, as well as the danger of “election denialers” — perfectly match the top items in Democrats’ campaign playbook. Our study found that these topics were discussed in campaign stories more than the economy and inflation — issues that voters consider most important.
The study this year looked at the same time period as in 2018. It was from September 1 through October 26. The Big Three evening newscasts broadcast 115 stories that discussed or mentioned the midterm elections. This is about 60% more than the 130 minutes we recorded four years ago.
These are the key findings
# Burying Biden: Although President Trump was a major focus of network coverage four year ago (48% of all midterm campaign airtime in 2018), networks aren’t interested in targeting President Biden in 2018. Biden was only covered for 34 minutes, or 16 percent of the total campaign coverage. (See note below.
As one would expect, there is virtually no discussion about the Biden presidency’s successes and failures. TV’s 2022 campaign stories had just nine evaluative comments on President Biden (two positive and seven negative), or 78% negative spin. The full methodology is at the bottom. These same networks aired seven-times as many negative comments about Donald Trump four years ago (9 positive vs 54 negative), or 86% negative spin.
Despite the intense TV coverage four years prior, Trump received slightly higher marks when he entered the midterms. The RealClearPolitics survey shows that only 43 percent of Americans approve Biden’s job approval. This compares to 54 percent who disapprove. Four years ago, Trump’s approval rating stood at 44 percent. This was compared to 52 percent disapproval. Despite the disapproval of the public, the networks don’t give Biden the same negative attention they gave Trump four years ago.
# Blasting Republicans This is not a great result, but it’s not as bad as Republicans who received 94 negative comments to go along with 14 positive statements. This gives Republicans a spin score that is 87 percent negative and almost identical to Trump’s 88 percent negative spin in 2018.
The discussion centered on four candidates this year: Republicans Herschel and Mehmet Oz, Kari Lake and John Fetterman. Fetterman’s negative press (81%, mostly comments praising his terrible debate performance) was the worst among Democrats, but it was better that any of the top Republicans. His Senate rival Oz was hit with 82 per cent negative press, while Georgia’s Herschel Walk was hit with 50 negative statements, compared to six positive ones, an 89% negative spin.
This is still better than Arizona’s Kari lake, who was the recipient of nine negative evaluative comments. She received a 100 percent negative score in the press.
Although Fetterman was the only Democratic candidate to receive extensive coverage, there were positive aspects for many of them, which contributed to the Democrats’ positive press. For example, Mary Peltola, Alaska House candidate, was featured in a glowing CBS Evening News story on September 24, 2012 about her “milestone” status of being the first native Alaskan to be elected to Congress.
Three days earlier, NBC’s Blayne Alex gifted Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams a “Power of the Vote” profile about her efforts in turning out “hundreds of thousand of new voters” during her rematch with Republican Governor Brian Kemp. It is not necessary to say that any Republican candidate received such a treat on any of these newscasts in this cycle.
# Showcasing Democrats’ Agenda. While voters consistently ranked inflation and the economy as the most important issues this autumn, broadcast networks’ coverage of the campaign focused on the Democratic consultant-approved agenda. With 15 minutes of airtime, the economy was fifth on the list of most cited issues in these midterm stories. This is less than half the amount that was spent on unverified and anonymous allegations that GOP candidate Herschel Walker paid years ago for two women’s sex abortions, accusations that Walker vigorously denied.
Separately, the networks spent almost 24 minutes discussing abortion policy. They believed that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would energize the liberal base. Robert Costa, CBS, announced that most Democrats believe Roe’s overturning has made them more likely voters on September 14.
Eleven days later, ABC’s MaryAlice Parks praised her network’s poll as encouraging news for pro-abortion candidates with “Americans trusting Democrats by an average of 20 points on the issue.”
Together with the abortion-related allegations against Walker it was the focal point of 54 minutes of television time, or approximately one-fourth all midterm news. A September Gallup poll showed that only 4 percent of Americans viewed abortion as the “most serious problem” in the country, while 38 percent cited economic issues.
The networks’ top three campaign issues were covered in 21 minutes of airtime. These included the alleged peril of democracy in the wake January 6 and the presence on the ballot of “election deniers”. Gallup polls found that only 4 percent of voters ranked “election/election Reform/Democracy” the country’s greatest problem.
Invariably, Republicans were the only “election deniers”, as these evening news reporters discussed, while Democrats, such Georgia’s Stacey Abrams who denied her loss in 2018, were never so labeled.
+++++++++++
Viewers and voters seeking election news have more choices than ever, but even today, the Big Three remain uniquely powerful, with relatively large audiences (collectively, about 20 million viewers per night) of citizens who are not as ideologically-established as the fans of wall-to-wall cable news.
While the establishment media is worried about the dangers to democracy there is a danger that a powerful partisan media presents itself as objective or centrist when in fact they are open advocates for one party’s success.
Notice: All figures for airtime or percentages are only relevant to our examination of midterm campaign coverage. This coverage will not include coverage of President Biden in non-campaign contexts. The same applies to coverage of issues like the economy or January 6th, unless it was specifically related to the midterm elections. This is the same approach that we used to count President Trump’s airtime in 2018’s midterm campaign stories.
METHODOLOGY. We calculated the spin by adding up all clearly positive or negative statements from non-partisan sources (in this case, reporters, anchors and voters, and any other unaffiliated sources). To isolate the spin being given by the networks, we exclude coverage that only reflects the partisan back and forth of the campaign. It also excludes “horserace assessments” of candidates or party’s chances of winning or losing. This is the same methodology that we used in 2018, and allows for direct comparisons between coverage of both midterms.
