Earning it’s label as part of the liberal media, ABC’s World News Tonight chose to ignore on Wednesday the latest on the Hillary Clinton e-mail server scandal to instead continue obsessing over video of a little boy being hit in the head with a football after missing a pass from Republican Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio (Fl.) in Iowa.
After the networks spent 18 seconds on Tuesday night and two minutes and 43 seconds Wednesday morning on the video, anchor David Muir spent another 18 seconds promoting “one unscripted moment from the campaign trail” with the football from Rubio “bumping into the guy’s head instead of landing in his hands.”
While ABC was telling their viewers about this video and providing a full story on Donald Trump’s plan to revoke citizenship from children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News devoted air time to the enormous scandal surrounding the former secretary of state (with the latter program running two reports).
In the case of NBC, anchor Lester Holt led off the program with a tease declaring that Clinton’s “feeling the heat” as she “hunkers down as her team does damage control” with “[n]ew evidence that the e-mail investigation is taking a toll as new numbers reveal Donald Trump now closing in.”
Holt continued after the opening credits and told viewers that “[t]here is a fresh indication as we start tonight that Hillary Clinton's support among voters is eroding in the face of the scrutiny over e-mails she exchanged on a private server when she was secretary of state.”
Leading into Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd’s segment, Holt again alluded to polling that concluded she “remains the undisputed front-runner for the Democratic nomination, new polling confirms a fall off both in the Democratic race and in a match-up with GOP front-runner Donald Trump.”
Todd started off by highlighting that Clinton “is trying to take a few days off and celebrate President Clinton’s 69th birthday” on vacation in the Hamptons, but shifted right back to polling and the scandal at hand with Clinton’s tumbling support in the polls after the latest CNN/ORC poll.
Adding that she “was put on the defensive over e-mails at a combative press conference” on Tuesday, Todd told Holt:
Lester, the campaign is trying to will this away as nothing but cheap partisan politics, but guess what? The calendar doesn't allow for this e-mail issue to go away for her because she still has to testify before Congress in October and the FBI is still determining whether there is a criminal probe to be had or not. So, it’ll be a long fall.
Justice correspondent Pete Williams picked up from there with the latest on the FBI investigation and whether or not Clinton or anyone else could face criminal charges and balanced soundbites between former Justice Department official Matthew Miller defending Clinton and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey arguing that legal trouble could be coming her way and that her case is similar to that of retired General David Petraeus.
Meanwhile on CBS, Justice correspondent Jan Crawford also gave an update on the FBI investigation and was the lone network reporter to note that “[t]he State Department filed court papers this afternoon saying it, ‘does not believe that any personal computing device was issued by the Department’ to Clinton.”
Crawford also reported on the late breaking details that the Democratic presidential candidate’s “attorney confirmed it was wiped clean of all its data before it was turned over to the FBI.”
It should be mentioned that while ABC ignored the story on Wednesday night, ABC’s Good Morning America covered it hours earlier with fill-in co-host Amy Robach proclaiming that Clinton was “[f]ed up” and “defiant” in “facing questions once again about those e-mails she turned over to the FBI.”
