On the October 8 episode of The View, Harris spoke about her experience caring for her mother after she was diagnosed with cancer and introduced her proposal to “allow Medicare to cover in-home health care” for seniors to help families with those costs. Harris noted that many seniors “want to stay in their home” and that paying for care “is so expensive.” Harris explained that part of the funding for her proposed expansion of Medicare will come out of savings from Medicare negotiating for lower prescription prices, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act that she cast the decisive vote for. Harris also explained that she wants to house this program under Medicare, because a similar Medicaid program has variable restrictions and limitations from state to state.

ABC, which airs The View, inexplicably failed to report on Harris’ proposal during its evening news program World News Tonight. Instead, alongside vitally important coverage of Hurricane Milton bearing down on Florida, World News Tonight covered the mugging of a baseball player, as well as the death of another long-retired baseball player, and even found space to report on the increased price of Mega Millions lottery tickets.

CBS’ Evening News and NBC’s Nightly News were likewise dominated by hurricane coverage, and likewise failed to cover Harris’ proposal at all. Nightly News in fact included a clip of Harris’ appearance on The View — her response to a question about whether she’d do anything differently than President Joe Biden did in the past four years, not on her proposal to expand Medicare to help millions of Americans with caring for their parents.

In contrast to these failures, PBS’ News Hour covered Harris’ proposal for more than 1 minute, featuring commentary from KFF Senior Vice President Tricia Neuman on how Harris’ plan would help many and contrasting it with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s lack of a similar plan.

PBS’ coverage of Harris’ proposal while its corporate competitors ignored the news is a microcosm of longer-term trends Media Matters has observed in the quality of broadcast news coverage of the economy. Media Matters assessments of the first two quarters of 2024 demonstrated how PBS serves as the gold standard in broadcast news.

Political media had earlier criticized Harris for not offering policy specifics or doing many interviews. Now that Harris has announced a slew of interviews and appeared on The View to discuss her economic proposals before its large audience — plans that hundreds of economists are supporting — major corporate broadcast news shows are simply refusing to cover it.

And some in the media are still criticizing Harris for not doing the right kind of interviews, such as CBS’ 60 Minutes — where she was largely asked to respond to GOP talking points about herself, while her opponent reportedly refused to do the interview because the program would fact-check him.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original episodes of ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS’ Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, and PBS’ News Hour for the terms “Harris,” “vice president,” “nominee,” or “candidate” within close proximity of any of the terms “Medicare,” “hospice,” “The View,” or “long term” or any variation of either of the terms “senior” or “elder” or the term “home” within the same phrase as the term “care” on October 8, 2024, when Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris introduced her proposal to have Medicare pay for long-term, in-home health care costs for seniors.

We timed segments, which we defined as instances when Harris’ plan for Medicare to cover long-term, in-home health care costs for seniors was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of the proposal. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed the proposal with one another.

We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned Harris' proposal without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about Harris' proposal scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.