Rather than dominating the news cycle, former Senate staffer Tara Reade”s recent allegation that the former Vice-President, Joe Biden sexually assaulted her has been slow to receive coverage in many outlets.
Read the first stepped forward in spring 2019 as one of several women who the accused, He of the inappropriate touchingbut it wasn’t until March 25, 2020, which means that Read alleged He had sexually assaulted her while she was a staffer in his office in 1993. In the podcast interview with a left-leaning commentator Katie Halper, Read, accused Biden of pushing her against the wall, reaching under her skirt and penetrating, with, his, her, finger. (While some of the Reade”s family and friends say Read told them about the incident shortly thereafter, the other Biden staffers at the time, or do not recall hearing about it, and He, you denied that it ever took place.) But the story wasn’t really featured in the mainstream media until after April 12th, when The New York Times published an an in-depth investigation of the Reade”s claims.
Since then, the accusation that has gotten more attention, starting on April 24, when the “Larry King Live” clip from 1993 that emerged in which the caller, who may be Reade”s mother think of her daughter”s “problems with a “prominent senator.” Coverage continued to climb after the April 27, when Reade”s former neighbor said that Read had told her details about the alleged assault in the mid-1990s, and May 1, when He himself made his first public comment on “on the allegation. However, our analysis of the closed captioning data that is Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, and pulled from the The TV News Archiveand of the online news articles from the Media database to the Cloud finding that the volume of coverage of the allegation remained low until very recently, and it has gotten more attention from right-leaning outlets, both on television and online.
One Of the three major cable news channels, Fox News, you have devoted the most attention to Read so far. Through Friday, May 1, Fox News-mentioned Read-in 371 clips collected by the TV News Archive — 344 of them on or after the 24th of April. Many of these clients were by the channel’s conservative commentators criticizing Democrats and the media you are not giving Reade”s allegation more air time.
By contrast, NOW and MSNBC mostly covered the story with on-air prayer, and the horse of the reporters who had investigated the allegation — but these channels also covered Read much less. Through May 1, CNN, had only mentioned Read-in 35’s clips, the first of which aired on April 25. And MSNBC barely mentioned her until last Friday, when He personally appeared on the network to deny Reade”s claims. (According to what you Read that has told The New York Times, neither CNN nor MSNBC have you asked to interview her on the air, though, that they have spoken to her off camera.)
But while the cable news didn’t mention Read at all, when the sexual assault allegation was first revealed, online news outlets did. After the story broke on March 25, the conservative news organizations like the The Blaze and the The Daily Caller picked it up right away. But while right-leaning outlets covered the story most heavily, Different, Start and The Guardian also wrote about the allegations in March. The Guardian and the Voice even noted then how the story wasn’t yet than appearing in mainstream news outlets. Fox News, which hadn’t yet mentioned Read, online, TV, and also published an article online about the allegations on March 27. Starting in April, the mainstream media coverage of the allegation began to pick up, but the volume of coverage mentioning Read you have still increased the most in conservative-leaning for online medium, which sometimes published multiple articles a day on the project.
At first, though, the headlines about the allegation were similar, regardless of the outlet”s ideological bent — compare with Breitbart’s.”Joe Biden, Faces New Sex Assault Allegation from Former Stafferif HuffPost’s.”Joe Biden Accused Of Sexually Assaulting The Senate Aide In 1993 In,” for example. But if you were looking for articles about the story’of the day-to-day developments, such as the the emergence of the “Larry King Live” clip, conservative outlets were generally the place to look (although the King clip was originally reported by The Intercept, which is regarded of the left-leaning). And after The New York Times”s investigation into Reade”s claims, many conservative outlets, also criticized its the handling of the story, which sleeping dogs this articles about the lack of the mainstream media’s coverage the end of the first allegation.
Once the Times published its investigation in mid-April, and other mainstream news organizations began covering the story as well. Some like The team and (Reuters), devoted entire articles to the allegation, but for others, like The Atlantic and Step, the early mentions of the Read appeared in articles that did not focus on her. And others, like NOW and – CBS News, mentioned Reade”s allegation not as a straightforward breaking news story, but in the context of how other Democrats were reacting. In general, the mainstream media was less likely than the conservative outlets to publish follow-up stories containing the new developments in the allegation, although that began to change last week, ace is gone the mainstream outlets joined conservative ones in questioning Biden”s silence the allegation, which may have led to his appearance on MSNBC on Friday.
Of course, one thing this data can’t tell us is how much coverage the allegation should be receiving; there is no “correct” answer. It could be the some have arguedthat’s the mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias and are avoiding the story for that reason — or it could be that conservative media outlets are simply likelier to run with a story that makes a Democrat look bad at all. It’s also possible that the mainstream outlets, investigated the claims, and felt that supporting the evidence they were able to find was not enough for them to publish the story.
It’s also a person to to compare the value of these to the sexual assault allegations, with coverage of the allegations made against the President, Trump, Supreme Court Justice, and Brett Kavanaugh or other politicians who have faced similar music. Any number of brazil — such as the prominence of the person being accused, the seriousness of the allegations and the number of accusers can influence the amount of media coverage of the sexual assault allegation receives, and Biden”s situation is not, you do not have permission to close the match along all of these dimensions. Most obviously, the only other politician of similar to the to the in the face of sexual assault allegations recently — Trump — faced several of themand was also a player, and the camel caught on video oct about his sexual pursuits.)
And perhaps the biggest confounder is the news of the environment in which this story, you have arisen. The coronavirus pandemic is currently sucking up so much of the oxygen media is that it is that unlikely any maps in the story would be this out thoroughly as it would be in normal times. So while it seems clear that the value of the Reade”s allegation you have so far been limited, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly, that is why.
