With New Year’s Eve upon us, NBC’s Today dedicated a segment in its 9:00 a.m. hour on Thursday to looking back at the year in news, politics, and entertainment. Not surprisingly, the liberal network made no mention of the Planned Parenthood baby parts video scandal, Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, the Clinton Foundation scandal, and Benghazi to name just a few.
Clinton Foundation
Making his television debut on the December 18 edition of One American News Network’s Tipping Point, NewsBusters managing editor Ken Shepherd promoted the 2015 winners of the Notable Quotable’s Worst of the Worst and the overall winner of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry scolding guest Alfonso Aguilar on October 25 for using the term “hard worker” because it’s racist.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Clinton Foundation group Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) admitted that it had made “minor errors” in its tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in both 2012 and 2013 and thus added another layer to the Clinton Foundation scandal. When it came to major broadcast networks covering this on Wednesday night, however, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News both ignored the new revelation.
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.

During a discussion Friday about the GOP debate, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff strongly rejected the premise that she was “part of the liberal media.” When Mark Shields suggested Donald Trump had th wrong target in Megyn Kelly, arguing "it is not like you're attacking Chuck Todd or Judy Woodruff or some of the liberal elite establishment. You're attacking the mother church when you go after Fox," Woddruff countered: “Let's make a distinction here, please. I’m not part of the liberal media.”
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s first national TV interview aired during Tuesday’s edition of The Situation Room on CNN, and while Brianna Keilar pressed Clinton on her e-mail scandal and tumbling poll numbers, the interview measured up to little more than a stroll in the park. Along with gooey questions about which woman she thinks should go on the $10 bill and who plays a better Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live, Keilar came at Clinton from the left on the candidacy of socialist Bernie Sanders and allowed her to pontificate without interruption for over a minute and a half on the work of the scandal-ridden Clinton Foundation.
Friday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC took a strange turn during a discussion of Bill Clinton’s latest comments about the Clinton Foundation scandal when co-host Mika Brzezinski demanded to know from panelist and New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters “why your paper is so interested in Marco Rubio's driveway” as opposed to continuing to dig into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation.
In a report for Thursday’s NBC Today about Bill Clinton saying he would stop giving paid speeches if Hillary was elected president, correspondent Andrea Mitchell lamented: “The charity has been lauded for its good works but both Clintons are being hounded by questions about potential conflicts of interest from donors and high-dollar speeches.”

Never mind the vast right-wing conspiracy, suggests Michael Tomasky in the June 25 New York Review of Books. What Hillary Clinton needs to concern herself with are 1) a possible vast mainstream-media conspiracy and 2) her and her husband’s propensity for shadiness and avarice.
In a nearly 3,800-word article that’s ostensibly a review of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash but in classic NYRB fashion is more about issues related to the book in question, Tomasky delves into topics including Clinton Foundation fundraising practices; the Clintons’ whopping income from speechmaking; and how they should clean up their act regarding both so that they don’t impede Hillary’s presidential campaign.
Tomasky also analyzes, and largely endorses, the idea stated in early May by Politico’s Dylan Byers that “the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate).” Tomasky specifies one extremely prominent northeastern liberal newspaper that’s “worth keeping an eye on” given its putative record of anti-Clinton reporting.
On Wednesday evening, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC marked five days since any of networks last covered a Clinton scandal while they combined to ignore news that a Democratic member of Congress has called for an independent review of Clinton’s e-mails, a House committee hearing covered her e-mail scandal, and a report that Bill Clinton took in $26 million from a Swedish group that was lobbying the State Department on Iran sanctions.
The latest network blackout concerning one of the Clinton scandals came to an end on NBC Thursday as a segment on Today by correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned an AP story from two days before exposing what appears to be a shell company run by former President Bill Clinton. ABC and CBS continued their streaks of ignoring it with all three having yet to utter a word about an International Business Times article explaining how Clinton Foundation donors received weapons deals with the State Department while Hillary Clinton was overseeing the agency.

Friday's New Day on CNN played up that the Hillary Clinton e-mails revealed by the New York Times "dispute the narrative that has been around for two years that she was trying to cover something up" about the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, as Alisyn Camerota put it. The CNN anchor also wondered, "Isn't this the opposite of what the GOP has been saying about her – that she...tried to keep it secret?"
