Is CNN Democratic or Republican?

CNN is experiencing several claims of bias and leaning toward one party while covering political events. The New York Times described the TV channel as a prejudiced tilt on Jeff Zucker’s research. In the study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and The Shorenstein Center on Politics, Media, and Public Policy at Harvard University, the authors found unequal treatment by CNN of Republican and Democratic candidates during the earliest five months of the presidential primaries in 2007: The programming that was used to study the channel often portrayed Republican candidates negatively with a ratio of three to one. The negative stories were 41%, while 14% were positive and 46% neutral.

This network painted McCain in a negative light 63% of the time and Romney in a neutral light because he had more neutral coverage than the others. However, the situation was also no better for other than Obama Democrats on CNN. The Senator’s stories from Illinois were 46% positive and just 8% negative. However, Clinton and Edwards had more negative coverage than positive coverage overall. Although the overall coverage of the Democrats was somewhat optimistic, this was mainly attributed to highly favorable bias behavior towards Obama.” Steve Kornacki, a political journalist in the New York Observer Column, wrote a piece on the channel “Clinton News Network,” which accused CNN of bias.

On Wednesday, April 3, 2016, protesters supporting Senator Bernie Sanders demonstrated outside the LA Bureau on Sunset Blvd. Those supporters were protesting CNN’s coverage of the 2016 US election, especially how little airtime Sanders had gotten. Protesters accused the major media network of intentionally shading Sanders’ presidential campaign over a myriad of more airtime on competitors like Hillary Clinton.

In October 2016, WikiLeaks released e-mails from John Podesta that revealed that CNN contributor Donna Brazile passed the questions that would be used in debate to the Clinton campaign during the campaign period. In her e-mail, Brazile expressed her concern about whether the former president could answer a question regarding the death penalty. On the following day, Clinton was questioned about the death penalty in a verbatim way by someone who was attending the Town Hall meeting. As reported by a CNNMoney investigation, Brazile confirmed that she shared the information with Roland Martin (now at TV One). The news network cut off ties with Brazile on October 14, 2016. Afterward, Brazile resigned from the channel in October 2016 due to the disclosures.

Various media pundits criticized CNN after being accused of bias towards centrist candidates following the January 14, 2020, Democratic Party presidential debate moderated by the channel and the Des Moines Register. Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone said, “This was villainous and shameful moderation at its absolute worst.” At the Huffington Post, Zach Carter said, “This moderation was awful, and repeatedly, its anchors simply substituted centrist CNN, which was so reliably anti-Bernie Sanders it dented its claim to impartial journalism.”

On November 8, 2018, following the midterm elections, former President Trump addressed a press briefing at the White House. Trump also took questions from the press, with CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta querying him on his use of the word “invasion” to refer to the Central American migrant caravans. Trump responded that he had wanted those immigrants to come in legally, and they argued with each other, including Acosta, himself, the son of a Cuban-American refugee, about his position. As he posed his subsequent query, the former president declined to respond by saying, “I have to say that I think maybe you should let me run the country. You run CNN and have done it well if your ratings were better” while gesturing to a White House intern to have the mic taken away.

Finally, Acosta refused to give the mic and wanted to ask a question about the special counsel’s investigation. Nevertheless, Trump said, “That’s enough,” three times more after trying to take the microphone from the intern. Acosta resisted this, and Trump later told Acosta to “put down the mic.”

The media bias rating change resulted from CNN being tagged Center in the Feb. 2023 AllSides blind bias survey. This prompted two editorial reviews in Feb. and March 2023, where it received an average of four out of six votes Then, AllSides shifted the channel from the Left category to the Lean Left category. The confidence level for this rating has changed from High to Medium for using different methods and getting different results.

In the Editorial Reviews, the AllSides panel identified some biases like sensationalism and emotionalism, word choice bias, subjective qualifying adjectives, the analysis presented as fact, and Lean Left story choice. Therefore, AllSides chose to reevaluate CNN by analyzing its shift in editorial management, which implied changes regarding content. Feb. 2023 Blind Bias Survey Center result was interesting. It is plausible that this affected the results since the team concluded it could be AllSides’s response with two Editorial Reviews. During the March 2023 Editorial Review, the right panelists insisted that CNN was Left, not Right. Hopefully, you can decide to find the answer to the question: is CNN Democratic or Republican?