MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham appeared on Lou Dobbs Tonight on Friday on the Fox Business Channel to discuss the media’s protective coverage of the Obama administration on the growing Benghazi scandal.
Graham said on the Big Three networks, "We've had 22 stories in the last couple of days about binders full of women and networks skipping out on covering Libya." (Video and transcript below)
Dobbs began by noting “Newly released documents confirm State Department personnel including Ambassador Christopher Stevens raised concerns about the shortage of security in Benghazi months before the September 11th terrorist attack. Ambassador Stevens himself wrote about security threats in June, August and the very day that he was murdered. Meanwhile, military sources telling Fox News that the terrorist attack may have been part of a broader campaign to drive a growing American presence out of eastern Libya."
Dobbs wondered why the media just can't use the word "lie" to describe what Team Obama did on these attacks:
GRAHAM: Even if you want to say, as Candy Crowley tried to do -- well, on the day after in the Rose Garden you said that, you made a vague reference to acts of terror -- we can still go back to Obama giving an interview to Univision on the 20th of September where he was still talking about the "natural protests" outside the consulate in Benghazi, which was just utterly fictional.
So, I mean, it is sad that the news media which really should be the people that keep the timeline, that try to take -- make some sense of these wildly-conflicting statements and hold this government accountable has really, instead, been sort of lazing around and not doing much on this. We've had 22 stories in the last couple of days about binders full of women and networks skipping out on covering Libya. That's just ridiculous.
DOBBS: And it's fascinating to me that major news organizations with serious journalists, obviously, working for them and often working very well in their craft, there must be an immense frustration even among the idealogically pure of the left who work in those organizations that they cannot report on a story this big, this important. In fact, this historic.
GRAHAM: Absolutely. And there are some that are covering, and it's not like nobody's covering it. And we've been noticing, for example, that Jan Crawford of CBS is covering it. CNN has consistently covered it, Fox News has consistently covered it, but we're talking about those Big Three networks with the biggest audiences in the evening and the morning. You're just not getting that. You're getting an earful of binders.
DOBBS: It is strange. And this, this president unlike any other has received immunity from the national liberal media. The national liberal media, I mean, you're kind to hold out those exceptions to the rule, but the rule prevails, and that the national liberal media, is frankly, giving this president an easy pass to utter immunity from critical judgment, from examination by a critical national press, which I think certainly puts the entire republic at risk.
GRAHAM: And we could certainly say this -- as long as, if we're going to call somebody out for being terrible on this, for The New York Times to take the major House hearing on this, where we're going to do some fact finding and say, you know what? We're going to put Lance Armstrong's troubles on page 1 and this on page 3 and then try to say to people when we're asked about it by the readers' advocate, "There were six better stories to put on the front page," that's absurd and irresponsible. For The Washington Post yesterday to have a story all about how Romney's missteps have enabled Obama to escape any judgment on this -- that's wishful thinking on the part of The Washington Post. It's not called reporting.
Dobbs said “it turns the paper into a campaign document.”
