A new study from the Media Research Center confirms that the news media defended the Democratic party during the government shutdown.
This won’t come as a surprise to conservatives, who have known for years that the media is basically the PR arm of the Democratic party, but it’s still good to get official confirmation.
One wonders whether this defense of the Democrats might also have played a role in the outcome of this week’s elections.
NewsBusters reports:
STUDY: TV news spends shutdown defending Democrats
Over the past month, the three major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) have hammered both Republicans in Congress and President Trump with a wall of negative coverage of the shutdown, while largely shielding Democrats from blame for the now historic impasse.
MRC analysts examined every evening news broadcast on ABC, CBS and NBC between October 1 and October 31, 2025. Of the 67 reports and news briefs discussing the government shutdown, 87 percent of the coverage favored Democrats. Analysts found 83 evaluative statements in which presenters or reporters were critical of Republicans, but only twelve that criticized Democrats.
Summary of findings
- Coverage of the broadcast shutdown favored Democrats over Republicans (87% to 13%).
- Only twelve reports (less than a fifth) even mentioned that Senate Democrats had refused to vote for a clean continuing resolution.
- Not a single report mentions that Democrats in March voted back to end the same Obamacare subsidies they are now demanding.
Democrats are routinely shielded from blame
Reporting on all three networks was noticeably vague about how the shutdown had occurred in the first place. There were only twelve instances in which any of the three media outlets hinted that Senate Democrats had repeatedly voted against a continuing resolution. On both ABC and CBS, only 12.5 percent of reports on both networks mentioned this basic detail. On NBC, that fact appeared in only 31 percent of newscasts.
Reports often included lines about the Trump administration “pressuring the Democrats,” or audio clips of Republicans demanding that Democrats “fund the government,” but usually did not explicitly acknowledge that Senate Democrats were the ones who prevented a funding bill from passing.
This is the same playbook the right has been dealing with for decades.
Democrats rightly realized that they could use the shutdown to their electoral advantage by trusting the media to wrongly blame Republicans
The media, as they always do, delivered a comprehensive message for their party https://t.co/4EMk8dPI4X
— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) November 6, 2025
Nothing new here. These companies are the communications arm of the Democratic Party. https://t.co/6VK3lfKmCb
— Derrick Van Orden (@derrickvanorden) November 6, 2025
The good news is that more people are aware of this game than ever before, which is why trust in the media is at an all-time low.
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