Time For Another Dishonest MRC Coverage ‘Study’

The Media Research Center’s Rich Noyes had a new “study” to promote in an Aug. 21 post:

Going into this week’s GOP presidential debate, broadcast evening news coverage of the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination has overwhelmingly been dominated by former President Donald Trump, with the remaining GOP candidates garnering just a tiny fraction of the attention given to the frontrunner.

The vast majority of Trump’s coverage (90%) has been negative, and heavily focused on the legal allegations made against him by Democratic prosecutors and the Biden Justice Department. But the networks’ coverage of Trump’s top GOP opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was nearly as bad (78% negative), suggesting a media hostility that extends beyond Trump himself to other Republican candidates and their conservative policy positions.

But Noyes has done nothing more than serve up just another of the kind of skewed “studies” it has done in previous years, with the same discrediting problems:

1. The study focuses only on a tiny sliver of news — the evening newscasts on the three networks — and falsely suggests it’s indicative of all media, even as it ignores the highly GOP-friendly Fox News, which the MRC considers the gold standard for how media should be covering politics (with a right-wing bias).
2. It pretends there was never any neutral coverage of Trump and Republicans. Indeed, the study explicitly rejects neutral coverage — even though that’s arguable the bulk of news coverage — dishonestly counting only “clearly positive and negative statements from non-partisan or unaffiliated sources,” according to Noyes’ meethodology.
3. It fails to take into account the stories themselves and whether negative coverage is deserved or admit that negative coverage is the most accurate way to cover a given story.
4. It fails to provide the raw data or the actual statements it evaluated so its work could be evaluated by others. If the MRC’s work was genuine and rigorous, wouldn’t it be happy to provide the data to back it up?

At no point does Noyes dispute the accuracy of any of the coverage, nor does he offer evidence to back up his suggestion that Trump’s multiple indictments have a positive spin that should be reported, or that the leading Republican candidate president should not receive the dominant amount of coverage. (Of course, if non-right-wing media started heavily covering another candidate, the MRC would simply accuse them of favoring that candidate, just the way it does so now regarding Trump coverage.)

Noyes concluded by declaring:

Eight years ago, the rap on the media was that it was so focused on a single celebrity candidate (Trump), the coverage deprived GOP voters of a real choice. This time around, TV’s obsession with Trump is far more intense, which means that if rank-and-file Republicans are interested in comparing the candidates, they’ll need to rely on events such as Wednesday’s debate — not the daily drumbeat of Trump courtroom developments that dominate ABC, CBS and NBC’s agenda.

What Noyes will not talk about, however, is the agenda of himself and his employer. It makes no sense to demand positive coverage of a candidate who can’t stop getting indicted, or to insist that candidates in single digits in the polls be covered as intense as the one with a 40-point polling lead over them. It seems that Noyes and the MRC would like a different Repubican nominee than Trump, but they’re too afraid to explicitly say so lest they face the wrath of pro-Trump supporters, some of whom may very well be the MRC’s funders. Again, there’s no reason to exclude Fox News’ coverage from evaluation given that the MRC thinks every media outlet should have the same right-wing bias as Fox News, which the MRC will never admit has an agenda.

In other words, another bogus, dishonest “study” that is designed to advance a partisan agenda and not advance the cause of “media research.” That’s why nobody trusts the work of the MRC.