Right-wing and left-wing media critics agree: The press is blowing the Democratic primary

Media Matters for America has roughly the same relationship with the Media Research Center as Magneto does with Charles Xavier, or the Monitor with the Anti-Monitor. It was created because the MRC existed, and it was designed to be its mirror image -- with the lofty mission of "correcting media misinformation." Hillary Clinton's allies helped build MMFA; Brent Bozell's MRC hands sarcastic "awards" to media outlets that go easy on Clinton and Democrats. This was the striking aspect of a new MRC report, which analyzed coverage of the 2016 primaries and found something that liberals agree with.

"Frontrunner Hillary Clinton has garnered 80 percent of the Democratic airtime since January 1," wrote the MRC's Rich Noyes. "Her closest announced rival, the socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, has received just six percent of the airtime, or about 24 minutes vs. 337 minutes for Clinton." The majority of Clinton stories, 54 percent, focused on scandals, while "just 57 seconds of Biden’s coverage -- less than two percent -- has focused on controversies from his past." Just two weeks earlier, MMFA had pointed to data from the independent media-watcher Andrew Tyndall, and found the press just as guilty of scandal-driven, Sanders-ignoring coverage. "CBS has found the e-mails more newsworthy than the candidacy (31 mins vs 19)," Tyndall wrote. "NBC has focused more on the candidacy than the e-mails (42 mins vs 26); ABC has treated them roughly equally (e-mails 25 mins vs candidacy 21)."