Too many million Americans still get their news from the Big 3 major network newscasts, and with the midterm elections just one week away those millions have been ill served by those news organizations. Last week a Media Research Center study of the evening newscasts for ABC, CBS and NBC found a precipitous dropoff in the coverage of midterm elections in the sixth year of a presidency. Obama, like Bush 43, is decidedly unpopular in his sixth year in office (though you wouldn't know that either from the way the media reports the polls—but that's a different blog post), and that means a likely sea change in the political landscape in Washington, D.C. come next Tuesday. In 2006, in the two months leading up to what was to become a Democratic takeover of Congress, the Big 3 networks had a total of 159 stories about election races. In 2014, when it looks likely that the GOP will easily hold the House and take over the Senate, those same networks had done a total of 25 stories—and ABC had done none.

It wasn't until last night, just eight days before the election, that ABC finally ran an election story. The lead-in from anchor David Muir: "The countdown is on, this evening, to the midterm elections tonight. Your voice, your vote. Just eight days to go before this election. The stakes? Enormous."

Really?

If they're enormous and it's important, why is your first reporting of it when it's eight days out?

Would election reporting be more plentiful on these networks if Obama was riding a wave of popularity and Democrats were likely to take back the House and extend their grip on the Senate? Certainly. The major networks are extensions of the Democratic Party (with few exceptions).

Want more evidence?

Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who won Emmys for investigating the Bush administration, highlighted another bit of journalistic malfeasance that took place at CBS shortly before the 2012 presidential election.

Perhaps the most eye-opening tale involves CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Benghazi and the president. During the second presidential debate in 2012, Obama challenged Mitt Romney by insisting he had labeled the assault in Libya a terrorist attack the very next day. This became a huge controversy, especially since CNN’s Candy Crowley had sided with the president.
Turns out that Steve Kroft had conducted a “60 Minutes” interview with Obama the day after the attack, portions of which had never aired. When Attkisson did a story on the flap, her CBS bosses instructed her to use a particular script and a particular sound bite that seemed to back up the president’s version.

She was stunned when a CBS colleague later read her another exchange from the interview:

KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya attack.

OBAMA: Right.

The correspondent then asked point-blank:

KROFT: Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?

OBAMA: Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans.

Attkisson writes, “I couldn’t get past the fact that upper-level journalists at CBS had been a party to misleading the public.”

Under pressure from Attkisson and others, the network posted the exchange on its website the Sunday night before the election, but it got lost in the final hours of the campaign. She says CBS News President David Rhodes promised her there would be an internal investigation, but she never heard another word about it.

CBS News President David Rhodes has a brother doesn't he?

The longer I've been out of journalism, the more disgusted I've become at the people still in the field.