Sex Scandals

After nearly a month-long blackout, NBC finally acknowledged on Tuesday night the sex parties scandal that’s enveloped the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) following the announcement that DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart will retire next month. While NBC Nightly News ended the network’s 26-day-long silence, it only devoted 18 seconds to Leonhart’s decision to step aside and only glossed…

On Tuesday night, ABC and NBC made no mention of a congressional hearing that took place earlier in the day addressing a scandal unveiled in a Department of Justice (DOJ) report that said Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Colombia had participated in sex parties over a multi-year period funded by American taxpayers and the very drug cartels they were fighting.

On Tuesday, Joseph Morrissey, Democrat turned Independent, was elected to the Virginia legislature despite currently serving a jail sentence connected to his relationship with a 17-year-old girl who worked in his law office. In the Washington Post’s coverage of the scandal-plagued politician on Wednesday, reporters Laura Vozzella and Jenna Portnoy insisted that Morrissey’s current prison status…

When December was new, we reported that The Washington Post was incensed enough to put obscure congressional press aide Elizabeth Lauten on the front page for disparaging the Obama daughters on her personal Facebook page, while the story of a former Democratic congressional aide pleading guilty to two counts of sexual assault ended up in a 281-word article tucked away on the far-right edge of…

When the now-retracted article by the Rolling Stone magazine was published on November 19 about a brutal gang rape of a first-year student at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia, the major broadcast networks rushed to the story and devoted multiple segments to both the article and reaction on the school’s campus. In doing so, they failed (unlike other outlets) to…

Former Newsweek and New York Times Magazine writer Matt Bai has a new book out making the wild claim that the 1987 adultery scandal around Sen. Gary Hart marked "the week politics went tabloid" and ruined everything in national politics by pushing the media into focusing incessantly on the "character issue." In a review Sunday in The New York Times Book Review, Reuters media columnist Jack…

John Avlon, who has modeled himself as a "no labels" moderate, acted as a liberal on Tuesday's New Day on CNN, as he gave his take on Monica Lewinsky's recent "cyberbullying" speech. Avlon praised the "so thoughtful and funny speech, and contended that "it reminds us 16 years after that constitutional crisis – that celebrity-driven scandal – the human collateral damage in that political witch…

On Monday night, ABC and NBC offered segments on Monica Lewinsky’s first public comments in years that came during a conference in Philadelphia for millennials by Forbes and explained how she was the first victim of cyberbullying during her affair with then-President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.  During the segment that aired on NBC Nightly News, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell declared that the “…

Appearing on Friday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, the reporter with The Washington Post who broke the story that White House officials knew that advance team member Jonanthan Dach had a prostitute stay in his hotel room during the 2012 Colombian prostitution scandal joined the program and took to blasting the White House’s numerous claims that no such cover-up exists. Reporter Carol…

According to a report in The Washington Post, senior White House officials knew that an individual with the White House advance team had a prostitute spend the night with him as part of the 2012 Colombian prostitution scandal despite the White House previously denying any involvement during the official investigation.  After failing to cover the story on their morning newscasts, ABC and NBC…

Self-proclaimed "victims' rights advocate" and MSNBC contributor Michelle Bernard wasted no time on Thursday's edition of Hardball defending former White House volunteer Jonathan Dach -- now employed at the State Department in the Office on Global Women's Issues -- from charges that he patronized a prostitute while on official business as an Obama advance man in Cartagena, Colombia.   

On Thursday morning, the Washington Post reported that senior White House officials knew that an Obama volunteer hired a prostitute during the infamous Colombia prostitution scandal of 2012 but Team Obama tried to cover up such information during the official investigation. Despite the Post report, CBS This Morning was the only network morning show to acknowledge the story during its Thursday…

Sure, nobody expects The Washington Post Editorial Board to earn a “Profile in Courage” entry anytime soon. But with its Sept. 16 editorial on the systematic decades-long sexual abuse of children in Rotherham, England, the Board showed the same cowardice that enabled the Rotherham abusers. According to the Post, “Sorting out why officials closed their eyes or looked the other way as an estimated…

Imagine a sex scandal centered on a small area, involving decades of abuse, with hundreds of children raped, assaulted and prostituted. Authorities suspected or knew of the crimes but did nothing, preferring to protect the abusers than aid their victims or see justice done.  If that city were in, say, Ireland, and the abusers Catholic priests, the U.S. networks would report it immediately and…