Newsbusters Since last summer, when CNN NewsNight shifted to an panel discussion-only format, host Abby Phillip has been praised for consistently inviting prominent conservatives onto the otherwise lopsidedly left-wing network. But with how rarely Phillip actually permits said conservative guests to finish a point without interrupting them, NewsNight is more akin to a televised struggle session than the beacon of ideological diversity as which it’s sometimes portrayed.
Summary of Findings:
- During a random sample of ten episodes of CNN NewsNight, Phillip interrupted a guest explicitly to contradict him or her (“adversarial interruption”) 130 times. Of those, 127 (~98%) were conservatives, while just three (~2%) were liberals. Thus, conservatives were interrupted adversarially 42 times more often than liberals.
- Conservatives were interrupted 60% of the time and were interrupted adversarially 58% of the time. Liberals were interrupted only 8% of the time and were interrupted adversarially just 1% of the time.
- Of the 30 guests (~96%) who were never interrupted adversarially, 29 were liberals. The sole conservative to avoid being cut off by Phillip spoke only twice, for a total of 68 seconds.
MRC analysts examined a randomly-selected sample of ten different episodes of CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip from the second Trump presidency. Each time Phillip interrupted a guest, analysts took note of the timecode, the guest’s political affiliation (either conservative or liberal), and the reason for the interruption (to contradict to speaker, to agree with and/or add to the speaker’s point, or to direct the conversation to another topic).
Throughout the ten NewsNight editions examined, we found Phillip interrupted guests a total of 149 times. Conservatives were cut off 132 times, while liberals were cut off just 17 times — a disparity of nearly eight-to-one . That’s far from an even split, but likely significantly better than what conservative readers might have guessed.
The numbers look even worse when one factors in the purpose of the interruption: Phillip silenced a conservative guest in order to contest a point 127 times, compared to a paltry 3 times for liberal guests. That means Abby Phillip adversarially interrupted conservatives 42 times more often as she did with liberals.
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