Lead Network Newscasts Ignore DNC’s DUMPSTER FIRE Autopsy on 2024

Curtis Houck
May 22nd, 2026 3:28 PM

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On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee’s 2024 autopsy finally reached the public view, and its error-filled, omission-laden contents were laid bare following a much-ballyhooed, will-they-or-won’t-they-release-it strategy by Chairman Ken Martin as the party struggles to achieve basic aims like fundraising. Unsurprisingly, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored it on their flagship Thursday night and Friday morning newscasts.

Along with having received heavy coverage on cable, the autopsy was still on the radar of these networks in the form of stories online and copious coverage on their respective streaming channels of ABC News Live, CBS News 24/7, and NBC News NOW.

Our friend and Daily Caller editor-in-chief Amber Duke pointed out many of the wild omissions:

NBC’s omission was particularly egregious as NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas covered it a mere half hour later on his NBC News NOW show, Top Story. And not only did he mention it, he spent nearly nine minutes breaking it down with two liberal strategists.

Here was Llamas’s quick summation before bringing in Ashley Etienne and Corbin Trent:

Now to the deepening divisions within the Democratic Party and the long-awaited release of the so-called 2024 election autopsy. The report was commissioned by Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin. Its purpose? To help the party understand why former Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President Donald Trump. Martin got an independent consultant to write it, but then put off its release, saying it was badly done. After pressure from other Democrats, today, the DNC chair published the 192-page draft that he says is still littered with typos and inaccuracies. The paper argues that Harris wrote off rural voters and failed to attack President Trump with sufficient negative firepower. The DNC adding disclaimers that the autopsy doesn’t reflect the committee’s views. 

Sounds serious! Perhaps there should have been, say, even a news brief on this during the big show.

Etienne was indignant, blasting the DNC’s “complete failure of leadership” by Martin in two basic jobs of “raise money and...win elections” and the autospy lacked “a vision on how to rebuild this party, how to win elections going forward from the state level to the national level.”

“Ken Martin made this entire autopsy debate about himself rather than about the party, about how to rebuild the party and how to bring back what we’re seeing — a bleeding support among the party’s base vote voters,” she added.

Etienne defended her former boss, Kamala Harris (click “expand”):

LLAMAS: So, do you think that publishing this document was unfair to your former boss, Vice President Harris? I mean, it is called an autopsy. And Democrats lost the election, so it was going to be tough regardless, wasn’t it?

ETIENNE: Well, I think she’s vindicated in this document. And she wrote a book about, you know, the 107 Days — and in the book, she made, you know — made assertions that she didn’t get the level of support from the campaign, that the campaign had significant failures in terms of messaging, in terms of its aggression on messaging towards Donald Trump. And that’s what this document actually lays out. So, she’s — she’s fairly vindicated here. But let me just say this. You know, the Democratic Party, the backbone of the Democratic Party is black voters and Ken martin and the Democratic Party owes an explanation to black voters who have been substantially destroyed and attacked from our political power to our economic power by this particular administration, over 600,000 jobs, we’ve lost 8.5 percent unemployment. And we’ve — in the past two weeks have lost we’ve seen 400 years of black political progress undermined with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. The party has to explain what happened to the money. That’s what’s missing from this actual report, is what’s happened to the money[.]

Trent also seethed the autopsy “didn’t recognize in any of the last decades that I’ve been involved in this process is that the Democratic Party’s policies aren’t working.” Unlike Etienne, he argued that, at the end of the day, an election’s win or loss starts with the candidate, regardless of the people around them.

As for something Nightly News did cover, they had a brief on a would-be burglar at a café finding himself trapped in one of its walls.

Thursday’s CBS Evening News and Friday’s CBS Mornings were also out to lunch. The latter instead covered topics such as a brawl at a Toledo, Ohio kindergarten graduation.

Just like NBC, CBS buried it on their streaming channel with mentions throughout the day, including on their lead newscast, The Daily Report.

Here was fill-in host Meg Oliver:

The DNC has released its long-awaited autopsy report on its 2024 election loss. Party chair Ken Martin kept the nearly 200-page document under wraps for months, as other Democrats pressured him to release it. Today, he said the report “does not meet my standards.” Martin said he ultimately chose to release it in an effort of transparency. Among some of the report’s findings, it blames former Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss on a lack of support from former President Joe Biden’s team. It also blamed the Democratic Party for not emphasizing President Trump’s negatives. 

Just like NBC, they turned to a liberal political operative in CBS News contributor Joel Payne to give his thoughts (click “expand”):

You know, Hanlon’s razor tells us, don’t blame malice when stupidity is just as good of an answer. And I think that actually, to me, summarizes how I feel about this report — both the contents of the report and also the process by which it took the DNC to get to getting this report and to releasing it. I think Democrats did themselves such a disservice by how the DNC went through a process of collecting this information, processing it, trying to hold it from the public, doing all the things essentially that the report said that people were frustrated with from the Democratic Party in 2024. In many ways, this report, the handling of it, is actually the perfect encapsulation of why the public, so much of the public, particularly so much of the base of the Democratic Party, broke with the party and did not show up in 2024 when they needed them.

(....)

I think what’s missing from it primarily is a conclusion, because if you looked at the report, you see it didn’t actually have a conclusion that was provided by the author. The DNC had to develop one. I think also the types of audiences that it was supposed to speak to, many of them are missing. I think some of the topics that it could have covered Gaza and the situation in the Middle East being a big driver of distrust and frustration with the Democratic brand in 2024, that was missing. I mean, I got all day here, Meg. There’s a lot that’s missing from this report. The last thing I would just say to you really quickly is I think that people are look, they’re thinking today about this report as kind of the main character. And while I understand that the main character isn’t the report. It’s the lack of trust, it’s the lack of credibility, and it’s the lack of competence that was on display by the report’s author and by the DNC and how they handled it. And I think that’s an important framing to keep in mind.

Disney’s ABC didn’t care to find time on Thursday’s World News Tonight and Friday’s Good Morning America. But, true to form, Good Morning America channeled its not-so-inner corporate whore with a segment promoting new Disney Parks attractions celebrating The Mandalorian and Grogu and Bluey!.

In terms of on-air mentions, ABC stashed them over on ABC News Live, including two segments on ABC News Live Prime. Host Linsey Davis first mentioned it at the end of an interview with Fairfax County, Virginia Democrat Congressman James Walkinshaw.

Davis described the report as having “found that the White House did not do enough to elevate Vice President Harris and detailed some, but not all, of the moments that led to her loss in 2024” and then asked if it was “a mistake for the DNC chairman, Ken Martin, not to release this sooner,” whether Martin should be replaced, and whether it was a mistake to not “mention..the debate in the party over support for Israel and the war in Gaza.”

The second segment was a little more traditional with Davis going back-and-forth with ABC News political director Avery Harper.

Like a loyal liberal journalist, Harper insisted there was little to talk about since “we didn’t learn anything dramatically new” other than to “put a finger on some of the most painful realities” such as Democrats “not do[ing] enough to build Kamala Harris up as a presidential candidate...and that it struggled to make an affirmative sort of case for her candidacy[.]”

“[T]he party underestimated just how much economic anxiety there was out there and how much cultural issues were hurting them with key voting blocks,” she added in a cartoonish understatement.

Asked to explain “why it took so long for this report to become public,” Harper said Martin insisted “[h]e didn’t want to distract...from some of the victories that we saw for Democrats in off year elections in November of 2025, instead claiming that the party wanted to look ahead to the coming elections in which they are favored to” win.

Davis closed with a question as to what surprised her about things being left out.

Again showing her bias, Harper didn’t mention the lack of focus on Biden’s health, transgenderism in women’s sports, or even hemorrhaging male votes. Harper joined Payne and Davis from earlier with Walkinshaw in citing Gaza:

You know, it surprised me that it does not mention the issue of Biden’s handling of Israel and Gaza. We know that that was an incredibly important issue, particularly for young voters, for Arab American voters in places like Michigan, key battleground states. This report makes no mention of it.

To see the relevant transcripts from May 21, click here (for ABC News Live), here (for CBS News 24/7), and here (for NBC News NOW).

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