Last week, the longest government shutdown in US history mercifully came to an end. The 76-day closure was naturally reported nationwide. Yesterday (May 4), the watchdog Media Research Center (MRC) published its findings after studying how the three network news organizations reported the event.
Unsurprisingly, the MRC analysts who tirelessly scanned every broadcast since the shutdown began found that only 5% of the coverage placed the blame on the Democratic Party. The other 95% said it was the fault of the GOP. According to the data, the NBC Nightly News, the CBS Evening News, and ABC’s World News Tonight only made mention of Democrat involvement on “21 out of the 76 days” in which Democrat demands were made.
Network News — Not Fair or Balanced
The greatest change in equal-party blame for the shutdown came from Bari Weiss’ CBS newsroom, which went from a high of 10% blaming the Democrats to a final tally of about 4%, according to an article published on the MRC website, Newsbusters. Speaking to Liberty Nation News yesterday, MRC President David Bozell remarked, “When major networks omit the central facts behind a national crisis, they are not informing the public. They are shaping perception. And they are doing it with intent.”
And there’s the rub. As Curtis Houck wrote on Newsbusters:
“[W]hen the elite media spent such an infinitesimal amount of time during this most recent shutdown highlighting the basic facts of why hundreds of thousands of American workers went months without pay, it’s easy to see why Americans resort to an answer the press have molded and shaped for decades: It’s the GOP’s fault.”
At the core of the shutdown was the argument over immigration enforcement. The Republicans wanted to round up the bad guys who had committed crimes, while the Democrats refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security in order to hamper ICE and stop the arrests and deportations. It was essentially a Democratic move to hamstring the GOP by restricting DHS funding. The Senate came to the rescue by passing a bipartisan bill, but members of the House weren’t buying it. Finally, the House cleared the way for funding the DHS and ICE — but not for immigration enforcement.
CBS Doesn’t Turn Over a New Leaf
The fact that CBS landed at 4% in the MRC study is troubling because such polarization was expected to subside under the leadership of Weiss as editor-in-chief. At least that was the talking point. If, indeed, she is making inroads toward representing Americans who are in the political middle, it didn’t show up in this study.
The time a network news organization spends blaming a single political party can change perceptions. The fact that the networks are up to their old tricks is not surprising, but it certainly is disappointing. This also stands as the primary reason the alternative media exists, as Americans forgo the nightly news in droves and open their phones to read less-biased coverage of major US events.
