For two days, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been embroiled in scandal after former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould testified before the House of Commons Justice Committee that he pressured her to back off a bribery investigation into an engineering company. The liberal networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have kept the scandal off their morning and evening news shows. But on Thursday, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News pounced on Benjamin Netanyahu’s impending indictment.
Both CBS and NBC ran full reports on the indictment Netanyahu was facing for alleged bribery and corruption. They hyped the fact that the sitting PM was facing reelection in just 40 days. “It does have the makings of a political drama: A sitting prime minister in power for a decade in the midst of a tight re-election campaign,” reported CBS’s Seth Doane.
But Trudeau also found himself facing down a massive administration-threating scandal during an election year. The Canadian PM was in so much danger that it had Politico declaring: “All bets are now off about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's political survival.”
“Until recently, his reelection appeared to be nearly a lock. The latest polls now show him slipping into a tight race — and those surveys don't even capture the latest influx of damaging detail,” Politico added.
The outlet also reported that, in Trudeau’s case, “A flood of new details allege Trudeau and several senior government officials repeatedly pressured his former attorney general to drop corruption charges against a large construction company and reach a settlement agreement.”
Looking back at how these two networks have covered Trudeau in the past, it’s downright embarrassing how they fawned over his looks.
On March 10, 2016, Ron Allan gushed on NBC Nightly News:
Trudeau, just 44, with a young family, stunning the world with his victory last November, following the path of his father, Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, a former boxer, now a political heartthrob, featured in January's American Vogue.
He even asked The Washington Post’s Emily Heil, “Do you think he's dreamy, too? Is that a word you'd use?”
On that same day, CBS This Morning wanted to talk about how “hunky” Trudeau was. And while ABC didn’t report on the impending corruption indictment against Netanyahu, they didn’t mention Trudeau’s. In the past, ABC also fell victim to “Justin Fever.” Good Morning America fill-in co-host Amy Robach once said: “The Canadian Prime Minister comes to Washington, charming babies, celebrities, and even Sasha and Malia Obama, as Justin Fever takes over the White House.”
In contrast, the networks aren’t the biggest fans of Netanyahu. They don’t take his warnings about the dangers of Iran seriously and CBS doesn’t like how he defends Israel from Hamas terrorists.
