Since last summer when CNN NewsNight shifted to an all-panel discussion format, host Abby Phillip has been praised for consistently featuring prominent conservatives. But given on how rarely Phillip 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.

But when one factors in the purpose of the interruption, the numbers tell a far worse story: Phillip silenced a conservative guest in order to disagree 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.

Additionally, conservative guests were only able to finish their point less than 40 percent of the time without the host interjecting. Liberals enjoyed a significantly more friendly 91 percent chance of speaking unimpeded.

In other words, any conservative on the set of NewsNight has worse than coin flip odds of managing to finish a point without first being interrupted by Abby Phillip.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

At least among the ten episodes we examined, CNN senior political commentator Scott Jennings was the most-interrupted guest on NewsNight: On March 10, he was cut off by Phillip a whopping 15 times. Second place was a three-way tie with 12 interruptions, shared between Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman (R-NY) on March 10, CNN political commentator Shermichael Singleton on April 22, and — who else? — Scott Jennings again, also on April 22. 

On the other end of the spectrum, analysts found 30 guests who were never interrupted adversarially, and 22 who were never interrupted at all. The lone conservative among them was model and media personality Elizabeth Pipko on April 7. However, Pipko was only present for the last two segments of the show, and she spoke only twice, for a total of 68 seconds. 

Those lauding CNN NewsNight for its ostensible ideological diversity might consider holding their applause until they take a look at the data. While Phillip’s willingness to grant a platform to conservatives on an otherwise notoriously liberal cable network is certainly praiseworthy, the gesture seems rather hollow when said conservatives rarely are permitted to finish voicing a complete thought.