On April 2, The New York Times published a surprising exposé about ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s fundraising machine: “ActBlue May Have Misled Congress on Vetting Foreign Donations, Its Lawyers Warned.” But while The Times’s willingness to break this embarrassing story about the DNC raised more than a few eyebrows, the ensuing total lack of coverage on left-wing broadcast and cable TV networks has come as less of a surprise.
MRC analysts examined all coverage on major liberal broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) and cable (CNN and MS NOW) networks from April 2 through the evening of April 6, 2026, and found not one word about this scandal.
The Times’s report described a 2023 letter to the House Administration Committee in which ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones represented her organization’s safeguards against improper foreign donations as thorough and “multilayered.” However, according to the reporting, ActBlue’s own outside lawyers apparently warned that that representation was dangerously inaccurate, and put the organization at “substantial risk” of a criminal investigation.
Worse still, one of the memos argued it appeared as though ActBlue had “accepted and/or facilitated” potentially “knowing and willful” illegal campaign contributions from foreign entities.
Obviously, the story’s potential to embarrass the Democratic Party seems a sufficient explanation for why none of these seven networks were willing to touch the story. But their avoidance also has the potential to grant them political ammunition to use against the Trump administration in the future.
Because none of these networks have alerted their viewers to the serious nature of the allegations against ActBlue, those audiences would likely be alarmed and outraged if the Trump administration were to — seemingly out of nowhere — launch a criminal investigation into such a vital organ of their political rivals. To anyone not familiar with The Times’s reporting, it would appear as though the administration were engaged in corrupt lawfare.
In fact, MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace has already attempted to employ something similar to that tactic. On the April 4 edition of Deadline: White House, Wallace read an excerpt from a later New York Times piece whose authors were attempting to sound the alarm about a “weaponized” Justice Department:
This is how The Times reports it: “Bondi and Blanche got the President’s message, stepping up efforts to investigate several other Trump targets, including the Democratic fundraising group ActBlue, John Brennan, former CIA director, and Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the President has accused of lying about his actions on January 6th, according to two officials briefed on the effort.”
That reading by Wallace was the only mention of ActBlue we were able to find on any of the networks we examined between April 2 and April 6.
What makes the silence all the more deafening is The New York Times’s April 2 report. Broadcast and cable stations alike routinely take cues from the “paper of record,” often treating a Times piece about a Democrat scandal as permission for them to address that scandal themselves on-air. After the 2020 election, for example, CBS went more than two years without recognizing the veracity of Hunter Biden’s laptop — but when The New York Times explicitly acknowledged it in late 2022, the network almost immediately followed suit.
At a glance, the ActBlue blackout of across all left-wing TV news seems like a fairly routine instance bias, given the story’s potential to hurt the DNC politically. But when one considers who broke this story, the TV void appears all the more shameless.
