Topic: Media Research Center
Add this to the pile of dubious Media Research Center studies. From a Nov. 3 post by Kyle Drennen:
It’s not just TV news that’s heavily skewed their election news this year – a major Internet news site has bombarded its readers with anti-Trump and pro-Biden headlines every morning for the past four months.
A Media Research Center analysis of The Daily Yahoo email newsletter, compiled by Yahoo News and delivered to the inboxes of approximately 225 million active monthly users of Yahoo Mail every day, found that from July 1 through October 31, those users were inundated with a startling 134 headlines negative toward President Trump. In sharp contrast, only six headlines were positive toward the President – a greater than 20-to-1 disparity. Meanwhile, Joe Biden received nearly twice as many positive headlines (29) vs. negative ones (16).
The Daily Yahoo is an aggregator newsletter that draws headlines from various media outlets, including Yahoo News, ABC News, Business Insider, The Independent, and Huff Post, among many others.
[...]
Out of 732 headlines featured in the newsletter over the four-month time period (six per day), 331 of them were related to politics or the 2020 presidential race. Out of that total, 99 were deemed neutral, meaning the headlines were either nonpartisan or were critical of both Trump and Biden. That left 232 headlines that were clearly favorable or unfavorable to one side of the political spectrum or the other.
Within that total, there were headlines that were positive or negative to one political party or the other, rather than to the Trump or Biden campaigns specifically. From July 1 through October 31, there were 31 anti-Republican headlines vs. zero positive headlines for the GOP. On the other hand, Democrats were given 15 positive headlines and only one negative.
If only a fraction of Yahoo Mail’s users in the U.S. read those headlines on a regular basis, that’s millions of voters who could have been influenced by an online news source with a clear partisan agenda against Trump and for Biden.
This being the MRC, it's a flawed and subjective metric, since "positive" and "negative" are typically in the eye of the beholder. Drennen also apparently refused to read the articles to find out whether the "positive" and "negative" headlines were justified by the content. And, of course, there's no posting of the entire list so people not as biased as Drennen could judge for themselves.
In other words, Drennen is expressing an opinion that can be disputed, not declaring a fact -- never mind that he and the MRC want you to believe otherwise. This fits into its anti-media narrative, after all.
