Nicholas Fondacaro
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The second high-profile stop for former FBI Director James Comey on his book tour Thursday was MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Just as the show began, the White House released all of the memos Comey kept on his interactions with the President, so the interview was dominated by softball questions mostly stemming from those. But as the show was wrapping up, Maddow took the opportunity to rhetorically get in his face about how he hurt former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s reputation.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s retirement went from bad to worse on Thursday as the Bureau’s Inspector General brought his case to federal prosecutors with a criminal referral. McCabe was fired in March after an IG investigation found he had lied to investigators about leaks to the press during the Clinton e-mail investigation. When it came to reporting the damning news that evening, NBC Nightly News ignored revelation all together while ABC and CBS gave it less time than his firing.
In a jaw-dropping display that was one part a lack of self-awareness and another part hypocrisy, Wednesday’s prime-time Anderson Cooper 360 featured a panel of CNN analysts sharing their opinions about opinion shows like Hannity on Fox News. Their opinions varied but were largely against the mixing of opinion and news. And that was their opinion on the news of the day. The hypocrisy was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
The communist government of Cuba held their sham election for a new leader on Wednesday after President Raul Castro stepped down to make way for Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel to take the reins. The news of the transition broke early that morning, but both ABC and NBC appeared too lazy to even give it a simple brief on their morning and evening broadcasts. CBS and Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo all ran reports on the transition.
In a disgustingly gushy interview on CBS’s The Late Show, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that no one went to investigate the Ritz-Carlton Moscow hotel room where the Steele dossier alleged President Trump paid for the services of prostitutes. But host Stephen Colbert apparently did and begged the former investigator to ask him about it. “Is it big enough for the-- a germophobe to be at a safe distance from the activity,” he obliged.
In a remarks late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump revealed the United States was in high-level talks directly with the North Korean government and had given the okay for South Korea to negotiate an official end to the decades-long state of war. These were major developments on the world stage but the evening broadcasts of ABC, CBS and Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo flat out ignored them. Only NBC Nightly News thought it was important enough to inform their viewers about.
The news of Barbara Bush’s passing wasn’t even an hour old Tuesday night when MSNBC host Chris Hayes had his All In panel use the news to malign the current state of the Republican Party. The liberal brought on anti-Trump Republican David Jolly and former Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) to discuss how the GOP had fallen so far since it’s heyday with the Bush dynasty.
The day after former FBI Director James Comey’s interview with ABC News where he repeatedly slammed President Trump, the liberal media was largely fawning for his chides and speculation of Russian influence. While their colleagues were focused on touting Comey’s media antics, CBS Evening News spent their Monday report fretting about the damage Comey may have done to any legal or political case against Trump.
Mere seconds after ABC wrapped up their Sunday night broadcast of its exclusive interview with former FBI Director James Comey, CNN began its so-called “Special Report” in which they mostly gushed about what it meant for him to trash Trump like that. While they did have some criticisms (which largely centered on his handling of the Clinton investigation), the stacked liberal panel sang Comey’s praises for speaking out against the President.
Shortly before ABC wrapped up their hour-long special interview on Sunday night with former FBI Director James Comey, Clinton lackey George Stephanopoulos pressed Comey on whether or not President Trump was fit to be president and whether or not he needed to be impeached. The answers may or may not be surprising.
With less than two hours until the highly anticipated ABC interview between George Stephanopoulos and former FBI Director James Comey, the liberal media was abuzz with speculation and admiration. One of Comey’s loudest supporters was CNN senior media reporter Brian Stelter. And amid his lionization of Comey during Sunday night's CNN Newsroom, CNN law enforcement analyst and former FBI Special Agent James Gagliano embarrassed Stelter by calling out Comey for being a “feckless leader.”
It’s not often the liberal media report on issues important to the values of conservatives and it isn’t often that they do it in a respectful way. But during Thursday’s CBS Evening News, the network put a spotlight on a case in Florida where former Miami Dolphins cheerleader Kristan Ware filed an official discrimination complaint against the organization saying she was harassed and made to feel unwanted because of her faith.
The liberal media don’t appear to show any signs of whiplash due to their wild love/hate relationship with former FBI Director James Comey. He was obviously still in their good graces Thursday evening with the three major network news outlets (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and Spanish-language network Univision hyping reported excerpts from his soon to be released book A Higher Loyalty. The three touted how Comey “blasted” President Trump for being “unethical” and his apparent apology to Hillary Clinton.
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has a reputation as a liberal bomb thrower (and hater of hammering). And during Wednesday’s edition of The Last Word, he had his claws out for House Speaker Paul Ryan who earlier that day announced he was retiring. According to the MSNBC host, Ryan was a worse speaker than pedophile Dennis Hastert and the pre-Civil War speakers who owned slaves; all because “they were all more effective in their job as speaker than Paul Ryan,” who wouldn’t oppose Trump.
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan (WI) left much of Washington, D.C. stunned Wednesday when he announced his retirement from Congress after over 19 years in office. But while ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News reported on his retirement and touched on GOP struggles in the midterms, NBC Nightly News almost celebrated it. Correspondent Kasie Hunt called it a victory for Democrats by declaring “Ryan couldn't escape the building blue wave.”
For many months, the liberal media had been warning us President Trump had the country on a crash course with a constitutional crisis because of his anger at the special counsel investigation. Arguably, chief among those doomsday soothsayers was CNN’s Carl Bernstein who has been comparing Trump to Nixon and Watergate since former FBI Director James Comey was fired. But during an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360 Tuesday, Bernstein had an update: “We’re in a constitutional crisis.”
The political highlight Tuesday was the joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees where Senators grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his company’s conduct for hours. Of course, a focus for three major liberal news networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) was the probing questions regarding the information allegedly used in the 2016 election. But they ignored questions by Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ben Sasse (R-NE) regarding liberal bias and censorship of conservatives.
The faux Republicans hired by MSNBC are known for their wild use of hyperbole during their anti-Trump screeds. But political analyst Steve Schmidt set a high bar for himself during Monday’s 11th Hour when he went on a loud tirade slamming the President for how he responded to the news his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen was raided by the FBI. And he was so happy about the raid, he claimed: “you can hear the faint applause from heaven of this country's founding fathers.”
A top story Monday evening was the anticipation President Trump would announce a plan to strike back at Syria in retaliation for apparently using chemical weapons on civilian populations. While the President himself came out strong against the Assad regime by condemning them and their Russian and Iranian backers, both ABC and NBC pushed a smear by Senator John McCain (R-Ari.) blaming Trump for the attack. And CBS failed to report the President’s condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
With the National Guard on its way to the U.S.-Mexico border to aid Border Patrol, CNN’s Brian Stelter kicked off Reliable Sources on Sunday by suggesting that Fox News had a hand in their deployment. According to him, Fox and Friends fed President Trump a steady diet of misleading reports that got him to send in the troops. Yet, Stelter and his panel never explained what was wrong with the reports and they even noted other outlets reported the same thing.