It seems like the only way a military family can get media attention these days is by bashing Donald Trump. On the evening shows of August 1 and the morning shows of August 2, the broadcast morning and evening news shows spent an additional 29 minutes and 53 seconds on the speech by family of slain U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan at the Democratic National Convention, while the same shows only spent 47 seconds on Benghazi mother Pat Smith’s speech at the Republican National Convention.
This brings the total up to 85 minutes, 6 seconds for Khan and only 1 minutes 57 seconds for Pat Smith.
As the disparity between coverage of these two speeches continues to grow, Eric Trump brought up Monday's MRC study on this topic during an interview on CBS This Morning, to point out the media’s double standard.
“I also find it ironic that you have Pat Smith, who’s the mother of one of the Benghazi – the soldiers who died in Benghazi, who spoke at our convention,” Eric Trump said. “Between all the news networks she got 70 seconds of airtime. The Khan family has gotten hours and hours of airtime. And what’s ironic about that was Hillary was the one who left them on the roof in Benghazi. It was Hillary’s policies that crippled Libya and Syria and Iraq, and caused so many of these deaths.
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The study, by the MRC’s Geoffrey Dickens, noted that Khizr Kahn’s speech had received 50 times more coverage than Pat Smith’s speech on ABC, CBS and NBC. The reason: One of these stories (the Khan story) matched the Democratic agenda, and the partisan media couldn’t push it hard enough. The other (the Smith story) reflected poorly on the Democratic nominee, so it was barely mentioned.
