While much of the news coverage Monday evening and Tuesday morning was dominated by coverage of the tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma, Tuesday's NBC Today did manage to provide two news briefs, totaling a minute and fourteen seconds, to the stunning revelation that the Obama administration searched through the private emails of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, supposedly as a part of a leak investigation.
Neither ABC nor CBS bothered to make any mention of their media colleague Rosen being named a "criminal co-conspirator" for simply doing his job as a journalist. Instead on Tuesday, ABC's Good Morning America devoted a four-minute segment to Michael Douglas and Matt Damon discussing their gay love scenes in a movie about Liberace. Meanwhile, CBS This Morning squeezed in a forty-seven-second news brief on the death of The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.
At the top of the 8:00 a.m. ET hour on Today, fill-in news reader Tamron Hall reported:
TAMRON HALL: The Obama administration also taking heat for prosecuting a State Department expert on North Korea and declaring that a Fox News journalist committed a crime by disclosing information that was leaked to him.
[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: State Department Leak Investigation; Fox News Blasts Gov't After Reporter Named Criminal Co-Conspirator]
Now, during a probe of the State Department adviser, officials issued a search warrant for the private e-mails of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, with the FBI naming him a criminal co-conspirator in the leak. His comings and goings from the State Department were also tracked. No charges have been filed against Rosen, but Fox News has come to his defense, saying he was acting within his rights as part of a free press.
She repeated the same brief at the top of the 9:00 a.m. ET hour.
