CNN Controversies - Allegations of Bias

Allegations of Bias

CNN has been the subject of allegations of liberal bias. Writer Eric Alterman has noted that many critics on the left view CNN as no more or less biased than most other corporate-run journalism, supporting business interests of its parent company and sponsors, and refusing to question official sources or present perspectives of leftist critics.

In a joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors found disparate treatment by the three major cable networks of Republican and Democratic candidates during the earliest five months of presidential primaries in 2007: “The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one. Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain faring the worst (63% negative) and Romney faring a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral. However, Democrats tended not to fare well either, with the exception of Obama. Nearly half of the Illinois Senator’s stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative, but both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. While Democrats on average tended to have more positive coverage, the trend was skewed by particularly positive coverage of Obama.

Accuracy in Media and Media Research Center (MRC) have claimed that CNN's reporting contains liberal editorializing within news stories as well as omission of important facts. Former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and MRC founder Brent Bozell, among others, have referred to CNN as the "Clinton News Network". DeLay has also called it the "Communist News Network". In its early days, CNN was sometimes referred to as "Chicken Noodle News". In September 2009, a Pew Research Poll showed that Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to rate the network favorably, and Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to see CNN unfavorably.