On Thursday night, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC each covered the news that the United States-backed government in Yemen had fallen after rebels stormed the capital city of Sana’a and surrounded the presidential palace on Tuesday.
While the networks gave this story airtime, they only gave it to the tune of one minute and 59 seconds and avoided any mention of how President Obama had, just months prior, declared Yemen to be a success story for the United States in fighting terrorism.
Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, sat down with Gerard Araud, France’s Ambassador to the United States, on Monday afternoon to discuss the fallout from last week’s terrorist attack on a French satirical newspaper. While the majority of the interview focused on the intelligence risks facing France following the attack, the MSNBC host found time to fret that the country could overreact in fighting terrorism. Mitchell asked Araud “do you fear an anti-Muslim backlash? Do you fear that France could go too far? There are suggestions that this country went too far after 9/11 in some of the security procedures.”
Fox News's Howard Kurtz reported on Monday that former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service over the hacking of her computers. Kurtz noted that Attkisson "alleges that three separate computer forensic exams showed that hackers used sophisticated methods to surreptitiously monitor her work between 2011 and 2013." The journalist seeks $35 million in damages against the federal agencies.
Kristen Welker, NBC News White House Correspondent, served as fill-in host on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports Thursday afternoon and took the opportunity to badger Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) over the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. Speaking to her Republican guest, Welker asked “some of the enhanced techniques that the report found included extended waterboarding, sleep deprivation, rectal rehydration, slapping and stress positions. How is that not torture Congressman?”
On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks failed to report on news that an internal memo was sent to members of the intelligence community by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper praising their efforts on identifying the rise of ISIS after President Barack Obama blamed them for not doing so in an interview on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.
The memo was able to be obtained by Fox News and its chief intelligence correspondent, Catherine Herridge and it detailed how government intelligence has, for two years, “monitored, assessed and called attention to the expansion of ISIS.”
Throughout the day on Monday, several sources in the intelligence community disputed President Obama’s comments in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired on Sunday night that the intelligence community and Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper are to blame for not recognizing the threat posed by ISIS.
On the Monday evening newscasts of the major broadcast networks, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir chose to ignore the story all together while the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley simply re-aired Obama’s comments from 60 Minutes the night prior without acknowledging the criticisms since the interview aired. NBC Nightly News offered a stark contrast as it aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment that included not only Obama’s comments, but congressional testimony from intelligence officials over the past year warning of ISIS and reports from NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel going back to January that both cited the falling apart of the Iraqi army in being able to hold territory and losses in territory to terrorists that U.S. troops had secured during the Iraq war.
On Wednesday, NBC's Today devoted a nearly four-minute segment to promoting a fawning interview that Wired magazine conducted with NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Despite introducing the story by labeling Snowden as "the man U.S. officials have called a traitor and a coward," co-host Willie Geist went on to proclaim: "Out from the shadows...in front of the flashbulbs. Appearing at times exhausted, at times defiant..." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
With a musical score playing throughout the segment that made it sound like an action movie, a sound bite ran of Snowden declaring: "My name is Ed Snowden. I used to work for the government and now I work for the public." Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dadich explained the magazine's cover photo showing Snowden draped in an American flag: "He came in actually quite nervous to the shoot. And he said, 'I love my country, I feel like a patriot.' And it was at that moment that we knew that we had the cover."
Glenn Greenwald, the radical left investigative reporter for The Guardian who published NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s documents, called the American media “racist,” “anti-Muslim” and “ethno-centric” “cowards” in a Huffington Post Live interview with Marc Lamont Hill Monday. His strong words are unsurprising considering his defense of the terrorist front group CAIR.
Huff Po Live host Marc Lamont Hill ate up the anti-Israel rhetoric and agreed with Greenwald that far too much media sympathy was paid to Israel while Gazan civilians were being ignored. Hill asked, “In the midst of this kind of imbalance in coverage, what grade would you give the U.S. media?”
While the liberal media establishment have a thinly disguised soft spot for massive leaker Edward Snowden and his enabler Glenn Greenwald, the editorial writers at Investor’s Business Daily offered an incredible take this week on how these men are “aiding and abetting the Islamist enemy.”
They released the names of several Muslim terrorist targets under surveillance by the NSA and FBI in a new expose titled "Under Surveillance: Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On." The New York Times lapped it up. IBD revealed how close Greenwald is to a terrorist-defending media watchdog:
Eleanor Clift of The Daily Beast profiled former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, and suggested she’s best known for asserting “the Obama administration is the most secretive of any she has covered, and in 22 years in Washington, that covers a lot of White Houses. She got plenty of grief from President Obama’s top aides in the aftermath, and while other journalists made the same observation, Abramson’s words carried weight, coming as they did from the prestigious newspaper’s first female top editor.”
Clift added “Two months after leaving the Times, in case anyone is wondering, she isn’t backing down from that assertion, but backing it up with concrete examples and inside anecdotes."
During a live webcast on NBCNews.com immediately following Wednesday's 10 p.m. ET airing of his interview with Edward Snowden, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams wondered why the National Security Agency was not more receptive to Snowden's claims of unconstitutional spying: "Knowing that in war powers times...the Bush administration use of war powers with Bush and Cheney, isn't the general counsel at the NSA a little bit on guard for a perversion, as Snowden put it?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
That question was prompted by national security analyst Michael Leiter observing: "Imagine you're the general counsel at the National Security Agency and you get an email which says, 'Listen, I think that you're violating the law here, this is unconstitutional.' And the general counsel gets this note and he says, 'Well, gosh, the Congress has authorized this over and over, the FISA court says it's okay.'"
After news broke on Thursday that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams landed an exclusive interview with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, the network began running promos wondering whether Snowden was a "traitor" or a "patriot." First a clip played of Williams observing: "A lot of people would say you have badly damaged your country." A second clip of the exchange feature Williams asking Snowden: "Have you performed, as you see it, a public service?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]