The networks finally paid some attention to special counsel Robert Hur when he came to testify before the House about his investigation into Joe Biden's possession of classified documents from when he was vice president (and a senator).
Democrats claimed Hur's failure to charge Biden with a crime was an "exoneration," which Hur rejected several times. Bill D'Agostino, our video editor and senior research analyst, brought around a video from 2019, when special counsel Robert Mueller failed to charge Trump with a crime in the Russian collusion investigation. Like Hur, Mueller stated that this was not an exoneration, but Trump went out and proclaimed himself "fully exonerated."
Bill's video lines up all of the liberal journalists repeating and repeating Mueller's words that Trump was not exonerated. In both of these special counsel probes, the media tap-danced on the Democrat line.
Bill and I discuss his study of about nine months of Hur's probe in 2023. From February 1 through November 20 of last year, the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) could only muster four minutes and 52 seconds of coverage of Hur. Almost all of that time was on ABC.
By contrast, Bill and our Rich Noyes counted 2,092 minutes of coverage of Trump and alleged Russian collusion from January 20, 2017 through December, 2018. That's a dramatic contrast.
Bill made another clip package on Monday, on what makes Democrats mad. Illegal immigrants killing Americans, that’s not so outrageous. What’s outrageous is calling them "illegals." New York Times podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro was mad at Biden on CNN: “We normally don’t use that word because people are not illegal.” While filling in as a host for Ayman Mohyeldin’s MSNBC show, Paola Ramos, the daugher of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, declared sternly: “To be clear, no human being is illegal.” They think this word is dehumanizing. We reply: you know what’s the most dehumanizing? Murder.
Because this has long been Donald Trump’s signature issue, it’s doubly or triply fraught with danger to sound like you're repeating Trump's argument. They felt Biden repeated what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was throwing at him.
We end by answering the question that Ed Morrissey of Hot Air posted on Twitter: "Name a movie you're pretty sure you like more than 99% of other people." Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
