CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley took it upon himself on Tuesday night to pull out all the stops to dismiss Hillary Clinton’s email scandal by chalking it up to just “one of those stories” Washington obsesses over and channeling a famous phrase of Clinton’s by wondering: “[W]hat difference does any of this make in Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination?”
Following the show’s opening teases, Pelley avowed that the ongoing story represents “one of those stories that gets Washington hyperventilating.”
When it was finally time for a report on her press conference at the United Nations (UN) by correspondent Nancy Cordes, she summarized what took place and how, even though Clinton said she “fully complied with every rule that I was governed by,” she still broke a 2009 federal regulation:
Federal regulations from 2009 require that federal records sent or received on private email accounts must be preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system, but Clinton didn't turn over her emails until this past December, nearly two years after she left the administration, and only after the State Department asked for them.
Once Cordes’s report ended, Pelley brought in CBS News political director John Dickerson and contended that “the partisans are going to believe what they want to believe” and therefore “[t]here’s no chance any minds were changed there today.” With that said, Pelley posed this question to Dickerson: “So what difference does any of this make in Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination?”
>> Read our full coverage of the Hillary Clinton email scandal here<<
Dickerson strayed from that line of thinking and instead suggested that what took place on Tuesday will play a role in how voters feel about her:
The central question here is trust. Hillary Clinton today asked voters if they – to trust her, and the question is do they? The question applies not just to the way she handled these emails but do they trust her in general when they see her explain her actions.
Over on ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir, that program aired clips of correspondent Jonathan Karl grilling Clinton at the press conference with Karl mentioning in his report (as Cordes did on CBS) the rule that Clinton denies she broke while Secretary of State:
Federal regulations from 2009 require that federal records sent or received on private email accounts must be preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system, but Clinton didn't turn over her emails until this past December, nearly two years after she left the administration, and only after the State Department asked for them.
While ABC and CBS mentioned this rule that Clinton broke, NBC Nightly News made no mention of it during its coverage of the Clinton scandal that lasted for over four minutes.
Interim anchor Lester Holt expressed the view that what Clinton experienced on Tuesday afternoon was “a preview today of what the campaign trail could be like” as reporters were “[a]ll hungry to hear why she used a personal email account” exclusively while Secretary of State.
Chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell covered the Clinton press conference and gushed that Clinton’s examples of emails that she deleted were “[a]ll deeply personal,” but did ask her how she would respond to calls to have a neutral, third-party auditor examine her server housed at her Chappaqua, New York home.
Later, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd diagnosed that “this will be a long, hard slog for her” and thought that “she did the bare minimum as far as Democrats are concerned, but she didn't satisfy her media critics and she certainly didn't satisfy her Republican critics.”
Finally, there was no mention in any of the network news coverage on Tuesday night how what Clinton said about having one phone was in contradiction with what she told a Silicon Valley audience last month when she admitted to having both an iPhone and a Blackberry.
The relevant portions of the transcript from the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley on March 10 are transcribed below.
CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley
March 10, 2015
6:30 p.m. Eastern
[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE CAPTION: Clinton Emails]
PELLEY: Well, it's one of those stories that gets Washington hyperventilating. Today, Hillary Clinton explained why she used private email to conduct official business as Secretary of State. She said it was a matter of convenience, but routing the communcations through her server at home prevented some of those emails from being automatically archived at the State Department and it allowed her to decide later which records to make public and which to delete.
(....)
NANCY CORDES: Federal regulations from 2009 require that federal records sent or received on private email accounts must be preserved in the appropriate agency record-keeping system, but Clinton didn't turn over her emails until this past December, nearly two years after she left the administration, and only after the State Department asked for them.
(....)
PELLEY: John, the partisans are going to believe what they want to believe. There’s no chance any minds were changed there today, so what difference does any of this make in Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination?
(....)
JOHN DICKERSON: The central question here is trust. Hillary Clinton today asked voters if they – to trust her, and the question is do they? The question applies not just to the way she handled these emails but do they trust her in general when they see her explain her actions.
