Alex Perez
In roughly 24 hours, ABC News had spent over 24 minutes (24 minutes 19 seconds) between their flagship morning and evening broadcasts gushing over Empire star Jussie Smollett and the alleged hate crime he claimed to be a victim of. But recent reporting from ABC7, their local affiliate in Chicago, suggested that Smollett may have collaborated with others to stage the attack because he allegedly was being written off the show.
On CNN's New Day Tuesday, co-host Chris Cuomo questioned if President Donald Trump will be able to overcome attacks on his credibility and the investigations that surround him and his team. His assertion came in the midst of polls placing Trump's approval rating below 40 percent nationwide with 80 percent of support among his fellow Republicans.
On Thursday, ABC and NBC aired their first reports on the beyond disturbing Facebook video of a racially-tinged attack by African American young adults on a mentally-disabled white man in Chicago. Good Morning America and Today, along with CBS This Morning, aired full reports on the heinous kidnapping and torture. All of the morning newscasts featured the "anti-Trump rhetoric," as Today put it, of the suspects. The CBS show stood out, however, for failing to explicitly mention the race of the assailants.
The latest illegal immigrant to allegedly murder innocent Americans was apprehended early Wednesday morning in Missouri and despite Mexican national Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino having a checkered criminal record, CBS and NBC found as little reason as possible to inform their viewers of this horrendous crime.
ABC, CBS, NBC's Friday evening newscasts all failed to mention Islamism as a possible motive in their coverage of the machete attack inside an Ohio restaurant on Thursday. ABC's World News Tonight didn't even use the word "terrorism" during their report on Mohamed Barry's rampage. Alex Perez merely noted that "Barry was known to the FBI, but was not under a full-scale investigation." CBS's Jeff Pegues underlined that "police say the assault has the hallmarks of a terrorism-inspired attack." Pegues was also the only Big Three correspondent to report that Barry was "here in the U.S. on a green card."
Good Morning America’s journalists on Tuesday couldn’t help but push far-left politics into the story of Flint, Michigan’s contaminated water supply. While talking about the emergency situation and the protests against Republican Governor Rick Snyder, reporter Alex Perez casually mentioned, “And one of the city's most famed sons, filmmaker Michael Moore, calling for the governor of Michigan to be arrested.”
On Monday night, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News omitted from their coverage out of Chicago the arrest of an African-American teen for allegedly making threats on social media against white male students at the University of Chicago in retaliation for the shooting death of Laquan McDonald. Somewhat miraculously, ABC’s World News Tonight and correspondent Alex Perez did find time to allude to this arrest in its report.
CBS This Morning stood out as the sole Big Three network morning newscast on Tuesday to cover a University of Missouri academic shouting down a reporter, briefly physically attacking him, and then calling people over to "get this reporter out of here...I need some muscle over here." Norah O'Donnell spotlighted Melissa Click, "an assistant professor of mass media," who along with "students, were telling the media...to back off." ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today didn't mention Click.
At the top of Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed that the jailing of Rowan County, Kentucky Democratic Clerk Kim Davis “could be the last front in a losing battle against same-sex marriage” as she had been refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage on June 26.
John Fund at National Review has written about three recent elections that show “Liberals In Retreat,” but only one is domestic: the Colorado gun-rights recall. The other two liberal defeats were in Norway and Australia.
A quick Nexis search demonstrated that ABC, CBS, and NBC all skipped the conservative victories in Norway and Australia -- but all three found time for news briefs in 2007 when Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd was elected in Australia on an anti-Iraq war platform. Meanwhile, lighter-than-air "Good Morning America" on ABC did find "news" Down Under when it came to trickle-down celebrity updates on Michael Jackson's daughter:
Imagine if controversial, conservative radio host Michael Savage also ran a charity supporting poor, urban youths. Would ABC ignore the inflammatory things he has said and only focus on the positive? Not likely. Yet, World News guest anchor Byron Pitts on Sunday lauded hard-left Catholic Priest Father Pfleger as a "Chicago hope" who is in a "league of his own."
This is the same Father Pfleger who, during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, defended Barack Obama by excoriating, "America has been raping people of color and America has to pay the price for the rape!" This is the same Pfleger who threatened to "snuff" out a Chicago gun owner. World News journalists mentioned none of this. Instead, Pitts introduced, "Finally tonight, a story that reminds us all about the power of hope."
For ABC's Good Morning America, favoring more guns on the streets is "controversial" but President Obama's plea for gun control is simply news.
"Those who argue that the best way to stop mass killings is to have more guns in the right hands at the right time, even in the classroom. It's a controversial debate," reported co-host George Stephanopoulos on Thursday. In contrast, ABC's Jake Tapper framed the Newtown shooting as a "tipping point" amidst Obama's push for more gun control.