Mauled in the Morning: GOP Candidates Hit from the Left

Media Research Center ^ | 10 Dec 2015 | Geoffrey Dickens

[FourPeas]

As the Republican candidates prepare to meet in their fifth cable news debate, they've also been participating in what might be considered a year-long, slow-motion debate on the broadcast TV morning news shows.

An MRC analysis of interviews from January 1 to December 4 finds the broadcast networks have pounded the candidates with a blizzard of hostile and left-wing questions.

Most stunning when it came to policy questions, the networks hit the Republican candidates with ideologically liberal questions 85 percent of the time, compared to those based on a conservative agenda.

An MRC study of the last GOP presidential race found the same thing. From January 1 to September 15, 2011 by a 5-to-1 margin, ABC, CBS and NBC morning show hosts employed an adversarial liberal agenda when questioning Republican candidates.

In comparison, from January 1 to October 31, 2007 (during the run-up to the Democrats' last truly-contested nomination race), the networks coddled Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other candidates running that year with a mostly liberal agenda of questions: 72 percent left-leaning questions, vs. 28 percent from the right.

This year, there have been only five morning show interviews of Democratic candidates through December 4, (two for Hillary Clinton, and one each for Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb and Martin O’Malley). Of the 21 policy questions posed to the Democrats, two reflected conservative themes vs. five liberal questions, with the rest ideologically neutral.

The clear pattern being morning show hosts aggressively asked candidates of both parties questions from the left.

[FourPeas]

From January 1 through December 4, the GOP candidates spent a combined 4 hours, 51 minutes being interviewed on the ABC, CBS and NBC morning news programs (Good Morning America, CBS This Morning and Today). Combined, these shows averaged nearly 13 million viewers each week in 2015, or nearly as many as watched the debates on CNBC and the Fox Business Network.

But compared to those debates, the airtime was not at all fairly divided amongst the candidates. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump took most of the airtime (9 interviews, totaling 1 hour, 22 minutes). The next most visible candidate was Florida Senator Marco Rubio (10 interviews totaling 50 minutes). New Jersey Governor Chris Christie came in third (6 interviews, totaling 36 minutes).

None of the other candidates managed to even total a half-hour of time. Ranging from Kentucky Senator Rand Paul with four interviews totaling 24 minutes down to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who had just one three-minute interview.

[Bon mots]

[FourPeas]

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