After not covering on Thursday night a report that detailed how Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents attended sex parties paid for by Colombian drug cartels, NBC continued to show no interest in the multi-year scandal by making no mention of it during Friday’s edition of Today. While ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir also failed to cover this story on Thursday, ABC’s Good Morning America devoted a news brief on Friday morning to the issue that ran for a scant 17 seconds.
Latin America
ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News ignored on Thursday night a scathing report that revealed how agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) attended so-called “sex parties” over a multi-year period while working in Colombia that were paid for by the very drug cartels that they were working to combat. Authored by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), the findings were part of a 181-page report into allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct across the various law enforcement agencies that fall under the purview of the DOJ.

On Friday's CNN Newsroom, liberal Rep. Charlie Rangel completely downplayed how the communist regime in Cuba has harbored a fugitive cop-killer for decades. Anchor Carol Costello raised how Joanne Chesimard, who was named to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List in 2013, was "granted asylum by Fidel Castro." Rangel replied, "I haven't heard her name come up in decades," and asserted that on the "radar screen" of "what's in the best interest of the people of the United States from a foreign policy point of view...her name doesn't even come up."
On Thursday night, NBC continued to shower praise in the direction of President Barack Obama’s move to normalize relations with the communist country of Cuba and brush off any criticism of the policy shift.
NBC Nightly News had two additional segments on Cuba that, with a tease in the program’s opening, totaled 5 minutes and 12 seconds, but only 28 seconds of that involved mentioning those against the move.
In the lead editorial for Thursday’s paper, The Washington Post blasted President Barack Obama’s decision to move toward normalized relations with the communist regime in Cuba as “naive” in awarding “an undeserved bailout” and “new lease on life” to “a 50-year-old failed regime.”
Following the trend set when news broke early Wednesday, the major broadcast networks continued their praising of the move by President Obama to seek normalized relations with Cuba on their Wednesday night newscasts.
Between the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC, they made only a few, brief mentions over the course of their 30-minute programs that Cuba was both a communist country and brutal in the treatment of its own people (especially dissenters).
During Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, correspondent Mark Potter reported from Havana, Cuba on the news that President Obama was altering U.S. relations with the communist state and parroted a long-standing liberal argument as to why Cuba’s economy has struggled for over half a century.
Speaking about the regime of Fidel and Raul Castro, Potter chose not to blame the policies of the Castros, but those of the United States in why the island nation has suffered economically: “His revolution is showing its age too and Havana, known for its charm and vintage cars, is on life support, its economy crippled by the long-standing U.S. Embargo. People here now hope that will change.”
Mark Halperin claims that the MSM has an "anti-Clinton bias." That might send the blood pressure of a Newsbusters reader rocketing. But before downing a diuretic, consider what he and John Heilemann had to say on their Bloomberg TV show today.
Halperin and Heilemann were riffing off the New York Times report that Hillary's State Department permitted a rich Ecuadorian woman to enter the US after her family donated big bucks to Dem campaigns. According to the Bloomberg duo, there are 20-30 such stories out there, and the media will be eager to research them, with Hillary's scalp being a prime prize for an enterprising investigative reporter.
Appearing on Friday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, the reporter with The Washington Post who broke the story that White House officials knew that advance team member Jonanthan Dach had a prostitute stay in his hotel room during the 2012 Colombian prostitution scandal joined the program and took to blasting the White House’s numerous claims that no such cover-up exists.
Reporter Carol Leonnig spoke with MSNBC’s Craig Melvin and slammed the Obama administration right from the moment she began speaking for their “red herring” of “the mistaken identity” and that it was “demonstrably false” for them “to say that the only evidence, which is what the White House is saying, that the only evidence involving this guy was that a woman had signed herself into this room.”

Mere hours before President Obama announced Attorney General Eric Holder's resignation, Sharyl Attkisson reported on Thursday that U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ordered the Justice Department to "turn over a list of withheld Fast and Furious documents by Oct. 22 [2014]." CBS Evening News mentioned Fast and Furious in their coverage of the Holder announcement that evening, but NBC Nightly News failed to mention the scandal (ABC's World News didn't cover the resignation at all).
NPR's Jason Beaubien spotlighted a woman's "nightmare with El Salvador's abortion law" on Monday's All Things Considered. Beaubien zeroed in on the case of Christina Quintanilla, who served four years of a thirty-year prison sentence, after a dubious conviction for the death of her unborn child. He also cited unnamed "activists who are pushing to liberalize El Salvador's abortion law [who] argue that the total ban is unjust because it only applies to the poor."
On Wednesday night, it was reported that two Marine Corps veterans are walking from northern North Carolina to Washington D.C. and the White House to demand that President Obama take action to ensure the release of Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi from a Mexican prison. However, none of the major broadcast networks have stepped up and covered the actions of the these veterans.
One of the two veterans, retired Lance Corporal Terry Sharpe, gave an interview to Greta Van Susteren on her Fox News Channel (FNC) show On the Record Wednesday and told her that he and fellow veteran Alan Brown hope to arrive at the White House to verbally deliver the message to the President within the next seven days. As of the interview, the pair were 100 miles south of Washington.
