The Media Research Center loves to hire right-wing polling firm McLaughlin & Associates to manufacture polls that help it peddle its preferred partisan narratives — i.e. falsely claiming the election was “stolen” and bashing CNN — without disclosing the fact that McLaughlin was Donald Trump’s 2020 pollster and is also his pollster this year, meaning that its work is highly biased and its fairness is in question. Becuase McLaughlin helps the MRC push those partisan narratives, it was called on again in an Aug. 14 post by Rich Noyes, complete with introductory quote:
“It’s 2020 all over again. As it stands now, another leftist media coverup will decide the election.”
— L. Brent Bozell III, Media Research Center founder and president
A significant new Media Research Center poll finds that large majorities of registered Democrats and Independents who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — exactly those who would be expected to support Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s contest — are mostly in the dark about many of the controversial and radical positions Harris has taken.
When asked about ten different aspects of Harris’s public record — on issues as varied as her sponsorship of the Green New Deal, abolishing ICE, and eliminating private health insurance — between 71% and 86% of these Democrats and Independents said they either had not heard of Harris’s position or were unsure.
When these voters were asked about where they got most of their news about political elections and candidates, by far the top answers were broadcast television (ABC, CBS and NBC) or cable news (such as CNN and MSNBC). This suggests that the knowledge gaps found by our poll reveal a failure of these outlets to report on radical positions once (and perhaps currently) supported by the now-Democratic nominee for President.
In fact, a detailed Media Research Center examination of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage in the three weeks since Harris became the leading Democratic candidate (July 21 to August 10) shows eight of these ten issues received ZERO attention from these newscasts, while two others received only minor coverage.
Yes, all the questions were focused on what it claimed were Harris “controversial and radical positions” such as “Harris supported cutting funding for the police” and “Harris supported reparations payments to atone for slavery” and “Harris would consider allowing death row inmates to vote.” This is classic push-polling, in which loaded questions are used to attack a candidate opposed by the person paying for the poll with the goal of swaying the electorate and not voter analysis. Legitimate pollsters generally frown on push polling.
Still, Noyes wants you to think this sleazy tactic is legitimate:
If our poll had been conducted even as recently as June, voters’ lack of knowledge about Harris might be understandable. But this poll was conducted in August, when the Vice President was receiving the most intense news coverage of her political career. Our study found heavy coverage of Harris on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts during this period: 184 minutes in just 21 days, eclipsing even that of Donald Trump.
Yet our survey of Democratic voters and pro-Biden Independents, who say their top source for news about the campaign are these same networks, shows the damage caused by today’s one-sided news coverage. These voters should be at least familiar with these key points about Harris’s past, even if they don’t agree with conservatives about their significance.
The fact that huge majorities don’t even know about these issues is damning evidence of the media’s selective and partisan approach to covering the 2024 presidential campaign.
This push-polling is effectively a paid political ad, which the MRC is not permitted to do under its current nonprofit tax status. Perhaps someone should have a chat with the Federal Election Commission about this.
Also: It’s painfully ironic to hear Bozell rant about a “media coverup” — a reference to his 2020 conspiracy theory that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election because legitimate questions were raised about the Hunter Biden laptop that right-wing media obsessed over — when he has been completely silent about X’s Elon Musk colluding with the Trump campaign to censor the leaked contents of the campaign’s dossier on J.D. Vance.