On Eve of Election, CBS News Finally Releases Libya Excerpts of Obama Interview
On Monday afternoon, Human Events writer John Hayward stumbled upon Fox News' Bret Baier's discovery of bias by omission from CBS News. It seems out that a key portion -- regarding Benghazi -- of a 60 Minutes interview was cut out to protect the president and his re-election campaign.
The original interview conducted by CBS’ Steve Kroft on September 12, 2012, left out an exchange where Kroft asked the president if this was a terrorist attack. He refused to say – outright – that the Benghazi attack was the work of terrorists. Now, with Election Day less than twenty-four hours away, CBS has graciously released the unexpurgated version of the interview.
Hayward wrote that “CBS kept crucial moments from the discussion of Benghazi in this interview buried for five weeks, at which point they released a section that many observers thought was damaging to Obama, but others cited as evidence that he wasn’t really lying about the nature of the attack, because he always knew it was a terrorist strike.”
Hayward also noted that “CBS was still playing games…they withheld one more little snippet of that interview until yesterday, and the last piece of the puzzle invalidates efforts to use the previous dribbles of information from the '60 Minutes' memory hole to build an 'Obama always said this was terrorism' narrative.”
Here’s the transcript of the full exchange:
KROFT: Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word terrorism in connection with the Libya Attack, do you believe that this was a terrorism attack?
OBAMA: Well it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans. And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.
KROFT: But there are reports that they were very heavily armed with grenades, that doesn’t sound like your normal demonstration.
OBAMA: As I said, we’re still investigating exactly what happened, I don’t want to jump the gun on this. But your right that this is not a situation that was exactly the same as what happened in Egypt. And my suspicion is there are folks involved in this. Who were looking to target Americans from the start. So we’re gonna make sure that our first priority is to get our folks out safe, make sure our embassies are secured around the world and then we are going to go after those folks who carried this out.
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As NewsBusters’ Research Director, Rich Noyes, pointed out on November 2, the media’s coverage of Libya has gone from “slanted to suppressed.” First, they obsessed over Mitt Romney's supposed faux pas in criticizing the president shortly after the attack and were lackadaisical in detailing the crumbling of Team Obama’s narrative about this whole debacle being the result of a YouTube video.
Later, the media ignored the increasing amount of stories relating to the compound’s security. ABC went a bit further and decided to bury the story relating to emails showing that the White House knew this was a terrorist attack from the beginning.
In the case of CBS News, they’ve proven that they’re no different from other media outlets – which are complicit in this cover up to help get the president re-elected.
