Citing liberal “misinformation” monitor Media Matters for America, President Joe Biden’s campaign is accusing broadcast and cable networks of giving Republican front-runner Donald Trump “a pass” on his extremist statements and age while hammering the incumbent over his age and gaffes. 

That came in an email to reporters email early Tuesday (Nov. 7) from the campaign that ticked off citations from Media Matters of the extremist views it, and by reference, candidate Biden, are saying network and cable news outlets are not reporting, or giving “scant coverage to.”

The Biden campaign said in the email: “When Trump stated that 'liberal Jews' were voting to ‘destroy America & Israel’ in a Truth Social post during the Rosh Hashana holiday — which advocate groups called out as incendiary and playing into antisemitic tropes — broadcast news failed to mention the statement in the following two weeks. MSNBC covered Trump’s post for 9 minutes, CNN for just over 3 minutes, and Fox ignored it."

When Trump said the terrorist group Hezbollah was “very smart” only days after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, the campaign said, “[t]he comment received just over 1 minute of coverage combined on broadcast channels ABC and NBC, with CBS failing to mention it. CNN devoted 14 minutes to the comment, Fox News 17 minutes, and MSNBC about 28 minutes (more than half of which came from Morning Joe).”

As to Biden’s age, the campaign said that while cable news provides “ample time” to coverage of the president’s age, it “largely ignores Trump’s.” Biden is 80; Trump is 77.

The campaign said that as the 2024 race heats up, “TV news outlets must highlight Trump’s extremism and inform viewers of the Republican front-runner’s unpopular beliefs.” 

According to Media Matters for America, no fan of Fox News Channel, that network is delivering “dramatically” more coverage of competitive midterm Senate races in primetime on weeknights than either CNN or MSNBC.

The Media Matters content analysis found that in the four weeks after Labor Day (September 5), Fox News cited Democratic nominees in seven competitive Senate races twice as many times as either of its competitors, and mentioned the respective Democratic and Republican nominees 336 times (212 mentions of Democrats, 124 of Republicans), compared to 179 times for CNN and MSNBC combined (76 mentions for Democrats and 103 for Republicans).

Media Matters said the coverage has been focused — it said “fixated” — on the Pennsylvania Senate race, noting that the race accounted for more than half of all the candidate mentions (190).

Fox News also dominates when it comes to interviewing candidates, Media Matters said, conducting 19 interviews with GOP Senate nominees since Labor Day, including six with Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV talk-show doctor running for that Pennsylvania Senate seat against Democratic Lieutenant Gov. John Fetterman.

The left-leaning Media Matters was definitely not celebrating Fox News’s focus on the midterms given the lens it suggested the news net was looking through.

“Fox functions as the communications arm of the GOP, and its biggest stars are working to ensure that Republicans take over the Senate and have an opportunity to implement a hard-right agenda,” study author Matt Gertz said. “Fox’s powerful right-wing propagandists are bombarding their audiences with a steady stream of attacks on the Democratic nominees while lavishing positive airtime on the Republican ones.” ▪️

AT&T needs to “immediately sever ties” with One America News Network, according to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of media watchdog Media Matters for America, after an exhaustive Reuters report detailing AT&T's inextricable and foundational role in building the controversial far-right media company. 

According to Reuters, which obtained deposition testimony from OAN executives, AT&T has contributed as much as 90% of OAN's revenue.  

Testifying in 2019 as part of a wrongful termination complaint filed by a former OAN producer, OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr. described a symbiotic relationship with AT&T, which he said helped will the media company into existence in 2013. 

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring testified. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [left-wing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

According to other testimony provided by an OAN accountant during the same trial, 90% of OAN's revenue came from carriage agreements with AT&T‘s pay TV platforms, DirecTV and U-verse TV, Reuters reported. 

The accountant estimated that OAN received as much as $57 million from AT&T at that point, although an AT&T rep disputed that figure to Reuters. 

With Herring having testified that he was offered $250 million for OAN at one point, the accountant was asked how much the media company would be worth without those pay TV carriage agreements. 

”Zero,” he responded. 

Reuters‘ reporting of close ties to OAN comes as the media company is taking heat for backing former President Donald Trump‘s bogus accusations of fraud in the 2020 election, as well as OAN's sustained reporting of misinformation tied to COVID-19 and the vaccines made to stop it. 

For example, if you are one of the 8 million people who, on average, visit OAN's webpage each month, and you happened to do that on Wednesday, you saw a lead item that includes video from the “Health and Freedom Conference,” with speakers including disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, a noted propagator of COVID-19-associated conspiracies, providing additional misinformation about vaccines. 

Meanwhile, OAN‘s San Diego-based parent, Herring Networks, is being sued by Dominion Voting for $1.6 billion for allegedly slandering the company’s voting technology amid its bogus election fraud reports. 

As described by Reuters, AT&T’s symbiotic relationship with Herring Networks, for which OAN is a subsidiary, dates back to the aughts, when Herring struggled to find carriage for opulent-lifestyle-themed cable network WealthTV, even complaining to the FCC about allegedly unfair business practices by pay TV operators. 

AT&T ultimately agreed to carry WealthTV on its U-verse platform, and later put OAN on the pay TV service, as well. In 2014, when AT&T agreed to pay $49 billion to acquire the much larger DirecTV, Herring helped salve issues with regulators, hiring his own D.C. lobbyist, meeting with FCC officials and signing proponent petitions ghostwritten by AT&T.

“Herring’s support of AT&T ran deep,” the Herrings’ lawyers wrote in court papers tied to the employment case. “Herring invited AT&T to utilize OAN’s news programs to cast a positive light on the acquisition and advocated for other issues affecting AT&T’s business.”

Speaking to Reuters, AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer responded, “We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

The recently spun off AT&T pay TV platforms, which are now 70% owned by the telecom in a joint venture with private equity firm TPG, represent OAN’s biggest carriage relationships. 

OAN is also carried by Verizon Fios and CenturyLink Prism, as well as cable operator GCI and virtual pay TV service Vidgo. 

Some Facebook critics were hardly reassured by its announcement Thursday (Sept. 3) that it would not run new political or issue ads in the week before the November election, branding it a PR stunt and essentially a nothing burger.

Women's group Ultraviolet minced no words, calling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a "menace to democracy."

Of the announced political ad moratorium, which Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook post, the group suggested that a week before election day is effectively a non sequitur.

Related: Facebook Won't Run New Political Ads Week Before Election

“Voting starts in North Carolina tomorrow," pointed out Ultraviolet executive director Shaunna Thomas. "Election Day isn’t in two months, it’s tomorrow and every day after, which means voters in that state and many others that vote early will be subject to months of dishonest ads on Facebook’s platform. For women and people of color running for office, these months of unchecked, untrue racist and sexist attacks are especially damaging."

“If Facebook were serious about stopping the threats of disinformation and election interference it would be fact-checking and removing political ads, in addition to intentionally deceptive posts, that proliferate across the platform," Thomas said. "Because the real truth that Facebook refuses to acknowledge is that ads are just a small part of the massive problem at Facebook."

Liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America was equally unimpressed.

“Facebook’s new ad policy announcement is designed to fool the media and the public into thinking the company is taking disinformation seriously," said the group's president, Angelo Carusone. "[T]his new policy is pointless - and may even do more harm than good. Makes no mistake - you can still spread misinformation with political ads on Facebook, you just can’t do it with NEW ads just ONE week before Election Day. According to this new policy, political ads that have at least one impression prior to Oct. 27th, can be rerun and re-targeted to new groups during the week of Election Day.  

“Facebook’s policy will only further empower those seeking to do harm, while weakening the ability of outside forces to counteract attacks and misinformation, something that has proven necessary given Facebook’s weak enforcement."

Back in June, and under pressure from Washington, civil rights groups, advertisers and others, Facebook announced it is going to start moderating political content more closely, but Zuckerberg and Facebook have been reluctant to take down political speech.

An overwhelming majority of President Donald Trump's live tweets about news network programming in 2019 were in response to news he saw on Fox.

That is according to a study by Media Matters for America, the liberal watchdog group, which said that of his 681 live tweets about networks he was apparently watching, 559 were about Fox News, 98 about Fox Business, and only 24 for all the other networks combined.

Those 657 Fox-related tweets constituted 9.5% of all his tweets for the year, an average of almost two live tweets about Fox per day.

His highest one-day total of live Fox tweets was 10, which was Dec. 18, the day he was impeached by the House. December was also his highest-volume Fox live tweet month of the year with 97. Of his Fox live tweets, almost half (45%) were about either Russia or Ukraine.

The President is a big fan of Fox's Fox & Friends morning show and his tweets reflected that, with 206, more than three times any other program.