ABC, CBS, NBC Uniformly Paint First House Impeachment Hearing as Unfounded Piffle

Tim Graham
September 29th, 2023 1:07 PM

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ABC, CBS, and NBC failed to offer live wall-to-wall coverage of the House Oversight Committee launching an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. They all honored Speaker Nancy Pelosi with live wall-to-wall coverage of every January 6 Committee hearing, including two in prime time. 

On Thursday night, these networks all presented this first hearing in Democrat Party-pleasing terms (short of skipping it). They proclaimed Republicans have "no evidence," never once betraying that it should be their job to be looking for evidence, holding the Bidens accountable...instead of acting like a journalistic Secret Service.

-- NBC Nightly News didn't give the hearing its own story. It was folded into a Ryan Nobles story on the impending government shutdown, to underline all the negative things Republicans were doing. 
 

-- ABC's World News Tonight turned to Terry Moran to rain fire on the GOP. "From the start, the Republicans faced a problem: They have no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing by the president. It's one thing to say there isn't yet an impeachable offense. These people say "any wrongdoing," in full Biden spin mode. 

Let's remember that this is the same Terry Moran who proclaimed in 2009 that "Barack Obama is the first President since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Office."

ABC really underlined their pro-Biden ardor by gushing over the president's remarks in Arizona, casting his sharp attacks on "MAGA extremist" Republicans as somehow a bipartisan appeal. David Muir hyped the speech at the beginning: "What he said today about Donald Trump, and what he hopes Republicans, independents, and Democrats will put first."

Then White House reporter/repeater Mary Bruce seconded that emotion: " Biden trying to reach out today with his message to Republicans and independents. President Biden with an appeal to national unity, and doing something he rarely does, calling out Donald Trump by name, as a threat to democracy."

This was NOT an appeal to "unity." It was not bipartisan. It was red meat, the kind of speech you'd give to a private fundraiser full of leftists. It doesn't appeal to Republicans, only MSNBC Republicans.

-- CBS Evening News led their program with the House Oversight hearing. The soundbites in Nikole Killion's report were balanced, but the narrative was not. CBS used the witnesses called by Republicans to discredit the hearing, that they "knocked some of the allegations down," when in fact they were merely stipulating that not enough facts were present to justify an impeachment at the beginning of the process. 

The unsubtle network message? Don't even try hearings like this. We will disparage them all. 

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