While both NBC’s Today and CBS This Morning on Tuesday managed to at least offer seconds of coverage to the State Department releasing the last batch of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, ABC’s Good Morning America completely censored the topic from its political reporting.
On Today, correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned the scandal during a report on Clinton’s Super Tuesday campaigning: “But just hours before Super Tuesday, the State Department released the final batch of e-mails from Clinton's private server that she used as Secretary of State. It's a controversy Republicans vow to hit her on if she wins the nomination.”
At the top of the 8 a.m. ET hour, fill-in news anchor Sheinelle Jones offered a 21-second news brief and used some Democratic spin to downplay how hundreds of the emails were classified:
The State Department has released the final batch of e-mails from the private server Hillary Clinton used while she was secretary of state. Monday's release of 3,800 documents contained more than 250 that had been upgraded to secret and confidential. However, none of the e-mails that Clinton wrote or received were marked as classified at the time they were originally sent.
On This Morning, like Mitchell, correspondent Nancy Cordes worked the latest e-mail release into a campaign story: “Last night, on the eve of Super Tuesday, the State Department released its final batch of Clinton's 30,000 private e-mails that she sent as secretary of state. In the end, more than 2,000 of those e-mails were deemed either partially or completely classified.”
Cordes noted: “The Clinton campaign is glad to get the drip, drip, drip behind them, but this is not over....There are still FBI investigations and a federal judge is calling on some of her aides to testify about why that server was sets up.”
Despite providing full coverage of Clinton expecting big wins on Super Tuesday, GMA refused to mention the scandal.
