On Thursday, NBC’s Today led with breaking news that Hillary Clinton staffer Bryan Pagliano would invoke the Fifth Amendment and not testify to the House Benghazi Committee about setting up the former Secretary of State’s private e-mail server. Savannah Guthrie wondered: “Is there something to hide? And what does it mean for the Clinton campaign?” Today devoted 6 minutes, 20 seconds to Clinton’s e-mail scandal. By contrast, ABC and CBS could each only muster less than a minute of coverage to the story.
Political Scandals
By Tom Johnson | September 2, 2015 | 9:21 PM EDT
In his standup-comedy days, Steve Martin did a joke about imposing the death penalty for parking violations. Michael Tomasky suggests that the House Benghazi committee has a similarly disproportionate penalty in mind for Hillary Clinton over Emailgate: wrecking her presidential campaign.
Tomasky acknowledged in a Wednesday column that Hillary “screwed up this email business,” but asserted that the committee “isn’t even pretending to be about the Benghazi attacks anymore. It’s a taxpayer-funded get Clinton operation, and it’s now all about finding a smoking gun in these emails.”
By Mark Finkelstein | September 2, 2015 | 10:29 AM EDT
How bad is it getting for Hillary when the best her defenders can come up with is Harold Ford Jr.'s formulation: okay, so the words most associated with her are "liar," "dishonest" and "untrustworthy" but, hey!—she's not "unpatriotic."
On today's Morning Joe, after Ford resorted on Hillary's behalf to the last refuge of scoundrels, Joe Scarborough hit him with a killer question: does Ford think David Petraeus—who was convicted of a crime for improperly passing classified material--is a patriot? Ford had to acknowledge that he is, but when Harold tried to distinguish Hillary's actions from Petraeus', Scarborough swept in to challenge him to a Romneyesque $10,000 bet: "who do you think passed more classified material along, David Petraeus or Hillary?"
By Curtis Houck | September 1, 2015 | 11:54 PM EDT
Deeming it not pertinent for their viewership, ABC’s World News Tonight refused to cover on Tuesday night the latest round of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails released by the State Department despite having briefly reported on them on Monday hours before they were actually released. Joining ABC in their zero coverage of Clinton was Spanish-language network Telemundo (which also failed to mention the scandal on Monday’s Noticiero Telemundo before the e-mails were made public).
By Kyle Drennen | September 1, 2015 | 4:44 PM EDT
Fretting over Hillary Clinton’s ongoing e-mail scandal on Tuesday, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell wondered: “Is she ever going to get out of this cycle?” The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza bemoaned: “...when the federal judge ordered the release of these things at pretty regular intervals....this was the worst outcome for her presidential hopes....We're not talking about her plan for college affordability. We're not talking about energy. We're not talking about income inequality.”
By Kyle Drennen | September 1, 2015 | 12:52 PM EDT
With the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal ongoing, on Tuesday, NBC’s Today and CBS This Morning assured viewers that the Democratic front-runner was in no “legal jeopardy.” On Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie asked Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd: “I mean, the central accusation, what people are worried about, is did she mishandle classified information?...is there a smoking gun on that issue?” Todd replied: “No, there's not.”
By Curtis Houck | August 31, 2015 | 9:37 PM EDT
On Monday night, all three of the major broadcast networks covered the impending release of more e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, but largely kept their coverage to a minimum before moving onto dissecting the latest 2016 polls on the Republican and Democratic sides. All told, the networks spent one minute and 42 seconds on Clinton’s e-mails and news that 150 of them have been retroactively deemed classified while Spanish-language network Univision spent devoted a 25-second news brief to the issue.
By Kyle Drennen | August 31, 2015 | 12:05 PM EDT
On Monday, NBC’s Today devoted a full report to Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress criticizing longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Fill-in co-host Willie Geist declared: “One of Hillary Clinton's top aides, Huma Abedin, is in the headlines this morning, with Republican lawmakers and Donald Trump taking aim at her position, and in Trump’s case, her marriage.”
By Tom Blumer | August 30, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT
One of the odder pieces appearing during the past week in connection with the Hillary Clinton email and private server scandal was David Ignatius's attempt to deny that it's a scandal at all in Thursday's Washington Post.
Ignatius devoted four of his first five paragraphs to relaying the allegedly expert assessments of Jeffrey Smith, who Ignatius described as "a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information." Sounds like an arms-length guy, doesn't he? He's not. He has been a security adviser to Hillary Clinton's previous presidential campaign, defended John Kerry against criticism of the Massachusetts senator's national security negligence in 2004, and served on Bill Clinton's presidential transition team in late 1992 and early 1993.
Media Yawns as Fox Reports That FBI's Investigation Into Hillary Clinton Is Focusing on Espionage Act
By Tom Blumer | August 29, 2015 | 12:53 AM EDT The establishment press is all over revelations by Fox News Friday morning that the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails involves a "section of the Espionage Act is known as 18 US Code 793," and that "the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to 'gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,'" according to "an intelligence source." ... Just kidding.
The only reaction I've seen thus far is at the Friday evening version of "The 2016 Blast" collection by Henry C. Jackson at the Politico. The fifth item covered — after a snippet on "John Kasich's Aerial Attack" and three snoozers on Mrs. Clinton's predictable dissembling — reads as follows (bolds and italics are theirs):
By Curtis Houck | August 28, 2015 | 11:15 AM EDT
On the Friday morning network newscasts, CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today showed no interest in picking up on an ABC News report that former President Bill Clinton sought approval from his wife’s State Department for speeches that involved African dictators and North Korea with the speaking fee for the former engagement worth $650,000.
By Curtis Houck | August 27, 2015 | 11:07 PM EDT
While it may be a shock that the major broadcast networks on Thursday night reported that Hillary Clinton compared Republicans to “terrorists” on women’s health, it was far from a surprise that ABC and NBC openly cheered her for “coming out swinging” “on the offensive” with some “tough talk.” In addition, ABC, CBS, and NBC all refused to denounce Clinton’s comparison even though they chastised the use of the term “anchor baby” by Donald Trump and Jeb Bush.