From Friday evening to Thursday morning, the morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated 4 hours and 13 minutes to discussing the recent allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile, not only has the continual release of the WikiLeaks emails from top Hillary staff gotten a comparatively puny 36 minutes of coverage during this same time period, the coverage that is there continues to ignore specifics that could be damaging to Hillary.
Still completely absent from the network coverage? Any mention of the emails where journalists collaborated with the Clinton campaign.
Journalists quick to be critical of Trump dismissed the entirety of the email leak as a “distraction” (Nancy Cordes, CBS This Morning on October 13) with “no major bombshells” (Kasie Hunt, NBC’s Today on October 8). CBS This Morning on October 13 even invited on New York Times correspondent Mark Leibovich to talk about the leaked emails, -- a reporter who himself was featured in the leaked emails for having Hillary Clinton approve one of his stories about her. Yet not a single CBS “journalist” even mentioned this huge potential conflict of interest.
Incriminating emails that were mentioned, such as Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s comments about “needy Latinos” were only mentioned in passing. In the case of a series of anti-Catholic emails, the worst examples were ignored.
A large focus of the network news coverage of WikiLeaks has been on how the emails were hacked and leaked. This is a legitimate news topic, but if these were leaked emails from the Trump campaign, would the same effort be put into caring about how the emails were released, instead of focusing on their content?
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