On Monday night, all three of the major broadcast networks covered the impending release of more e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, but largely kept their coverage to a minimum before moving onto dissecting the latest 2016 polls on the Republican and Democratic sides.
All told, the networks spent one minute and 42 seconds on Clinton’s e-mails and news that 150 of them have been retroactively deemed classified while Spanish-language network Univision spent devoted a 25-second news brief to the issue. Fellow Spanish network Telemundo ignored it completely.
NBC Nightly News devoted the least amount of time to the new batch of Clinton e-mails at 20 seconds as anchor Lester Holt ruled that in a brief that the news concerning more classified e-mails could serve as “[m]ore potential headaches for Hillary Clinton.”
Prior to that news brief, national correspondent Peter Alexander took an extended look at new polling data out of Iowa that shows socialist Bernie Sanders is closing in on Clinton with GOP candidate Ben Carson pulling into a tie with Donald Trump.
Over on ABC’s World News Tonight, anchor David Muir provided viewers with “some breaking developments” on Clinton with “[t]housands of new e-mails from that private server being released this evening, nearly 150 of them believed to have contained information that is now considered classified.”
Chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl described at the tail end of ABC’s 35 seconds on the e-mails that this newest detail provides “more evidence that classified information may have been mishandled.”
While reporting on Clinton, the pair made ABC the lone network to further advance a story covered on the Monday morning network newscasts concerning Trump “taking aim” at Clinton and aide Huma Abedin (who happens to be married to disgraced former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner).
In a change from his segment on Good Morning America, Karl dubbed Trump’s criticism “a harsh personal attack” and touted the Clinton campaign hitting Trump for doing something they have deemed “disgraceful.”
Meanwhile, the CBS Evening News reserved the first 25 seconds of its 2016 segment for Clinton’s e-mails with anchor Scott Pelley assessing the situation with the conclusion that “[t]his raises more questions that are already bedeviling her campaign”:
Another 150 e-mails on Hillary Clinton's private server contained classified information, according to the State Department today. 7,000 e-mails of the former secretary of state will be released tonight, but the information now judged to be confidential will be censored retroactively. This raises more questions that are already bedeviling her campaign[.]
