On Monday, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News prominently touted the claims by a fired staffer on the House Select Committee on Benghazi that the panel’s sole aim is to takedown former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a move that gives her “a potential lifeline” in “another blow” to the committee.
Libya
By Mark Finkelstein | October 11, 2015 | 12:51 PM EDT
Yeah, that's been our big beef with the New York Times: it's too tough on top Democrats . . .
So we'll all sleep better now that Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet has assured us that the paper is not "too aggressive" or "unfair" in its coverage of Hillary Clinton. On CNN's Reliable Sources today, Bacquet, as proof of the paper's even-handedness, noted to host Brian Stelter a Times story on Benghazi that "did not point a finger at her" and another story probing problems within the Benghazi committee.
By Mark Finkelstein | October 1, 2015 | 8:03 AM EDT
There was Hillary Clinton, telling Al Sharpton of all people that she found Kevin McCarthy's comments about the Benghazi hearings "deeply distressing."
That was too much for the Morning Joe panel, which just had to laugh. As John Heilemann put it, far from being distressed, Hillary surely sees McCarthy's comments—implying a political motive behind the hearings—as a Christmas and birthday gift wrapped into one that sent her "skipping through the park."
By Curtis Houck | October 1, 2015 | 12:19 AM EDT
During his segment on the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s All In attacking Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy for his comments about Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi Committee, host Chris Hayes made quite the choice of liberal pundits in none other than failed Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who compared McCarthy and the panel to the “witch-hunt” against Planned Parenthood.
By Tom Blumer | September 30, 2015 | 11:59 PM EDT
Apparently, the establishment press is waiting for its marching orders on how to handle what an Investor's Business Daily editorial has already called a "scandal."
This one's a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. As Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard reported Tuesday afternoon (i.e., now approaching two overnight news cycles ago), "Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who was working directly with Blumenthal as a member of Clinton’s spy network, was concurrently working as a consultant to CBS News and its venerable news program 60 Minutes." IBD's question, reacting to Hemingway's report: "Who is more corrupt, Clinton or the mainstream media?"
By Curtis Houck | September 30, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT
On Wednesday night, the CBS Evening News punted on the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s State Department e-mails released hours earlier while their competitors at ABC and NBC did cover them, but only through the veil of defending Clinton against Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy’s comments on the Benghazi Committee that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell touted as “an unlikely political lifeline.”
By Curtis Houck | September 29, 2015 | 6:18 PM EDT
In the rarely fruitless world of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews groaned at the top of Monday’s show about the ongoing Benghazi and e-mail scandals enveloping Hillary Clinton that have become “termite bites” for the Democratic presidential candidate as Vice President Joe Biden could still join the 2016 race.
By Curtis Houck | September 28, 2015 | 9:18 PM EDT
After part one of Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd’s interview with Hillary Clinton aired on Sunday’s show, parts two and three premiered on the debut edition of MSNBC’s MTP Daily and while the discussion on foreign policy included time on Libya, Todd neglected to even mention in his questioning the deadly 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi that has embroiled Clinton in scandal.
By Matthew Balan | September 25, 2015 | 8:33 PM EDT
Friday's NBC Nightly News failed to cover how the Defense Department revealed earlier in the day that they found an "email chain that Hillary Clinton did not give to the State Department, as a Reuters report put it. Mrs. Clinton exchanged the e-mails with then-General David Petraeus between January and February of 2009. Anchor Lester Holt did air a 16-second news brief on the other "big news from Washington" – Michelle Obama and the first lady of China revealing the name of the panda cub at the National Zoo.
By Curtis Houck | September 3, 2015 | 9:53 PM EDT
The CBS Evening News bid farewell on Thursday to Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal as the newscast, unlike ABC and NBC, dodged news that longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi plus word late Wednesday night that a former staffer who helped set up her private e-mail server would invoke his Fifth Amendment by not testifying before Congress.
By Tom Blumer | August 19, 2015 | 11:18 PM EDT
You rubes. Don't you understand that the entire problem Hillary Clinton is facing over her use of a private server to process government communications is the fault of thousands upon thousands of people who don't know how to classify documents?
That's essentially the argument Hillary Clinton's spinmeisters are now employing. This evening, Josh Gerstein at the Politico was all too ready to relay such arguments, even to the point of cleaning up what one of her defenders said to advance the cause.
By Tom Blumer | August 18, 2015 | 3:43 PM EDT
Yesterday, CNN.com published a attempted defense of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State by Eleni Kounalakis. An "Editor's Note" before the piece begins describes Ms. Kounalakis as the "United States ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013," the author of a book on her time there, and "a senior adviser to the Albright Stonebridge Group" (as in "Madeline Albright").
The "editor" at CNN "forgot" to mention one "little" thing, noted by John Hinderaker at Powerline: "... she was one of Hillary’s top (2008) fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State."