On Monday, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News saw no reason to keep their viewers abreast of two embarrassing failures in Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s recount efforts to alter the presidential election results as the recount ended in Wisconsin while a judge blocked it in Pennsylvania.
With ABC and NBC missing in action, the CBS Evening News covered the recount news, but barely as anchor Scott Pelley only mustered a 25-second news brief at the conclusion of the newscast’s political coverage that failed to even mention Stein as the major driving force of the recounts.
Overall, the 25 seconds offered by CBS stood in marked contrast to the seven minutes and 26 seconds devoted to the recount over four days of evening newscasts at the onset of Stein’s push and the 36 seconds devoted to her campaign prior to the recount coverage.
Here’s how Pelley reported the news concerning the votes in the two battleground states:
The effort to recount the presidential vote in states that put Mr. Trump over the top is over the top is largely over. Today, a recount in Wisconsin confirmed that Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by nearly 23,000 votes. In Pennsylvania a federal judge rejected a call for a recount, and that state certified that Mr. Trump won there by 44,000 votes.
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Of course, Pelley swept under the rug the fact that not only was Stein the person behind “the effort” but also how she raised over $3.5 million to finance these efforts. One additional point that the CBS News anchor declined to mention was that in the case of Wisconsin, President-elect Donald Trump’s margin of victory grew by 131 votes after just under 1,800 votes were added to the final tally.
As for Monday’s result in the Keystone State, perhaps the best summation came courtesy of our friend David French at National Review as he succinctly told readers on their site that “[c]onspiracy theories make for poor court arguments.”
The relevant portion of the transcript from CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley on November 12 can be found below.
CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley
December 12, 2016
6:40 p.m. Eastern[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: Recount Ended]
SCOTT PELLEY: The effort to recount the presidential vote in states that put Mr. Trump over the top is over the top is largely over. Today, a recount in Wisconsin confirmed that Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by nearly 23,000 votes. In Pennsylvania a federal judge rejected a call for a recount, and that state certified that Mr. Trump won there by 44,000 votes.
