While there is no shortage of negative coverage of Donald Trump, the broadcast networks continue to bury, ignore or downplay negative news about Hillary Clinton.
As NewsBusters has pointed out before, even when the broadcast networks cover the WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, they pick and choose which released emails to cover. Many emails that could be damaging to Clinton or President Obama were ignored or dismissed, while the focus has often shifted to a more general discussion of how the hacking may have occurred.
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A leaked email released on October 20 revealed that Hillary Clinton was going to attend at event in 2015, in return for $12 million to the Clinton Global Initiative from King Mohammed of Morocco. Hillary ended up not attending that event, with Bill and Chelsea Clinton going in her place.
In the emails, Clinton aide Huma Abedin vented to her campaign manager Robby Mook about this debacle. “It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months. She created this mess and she knows it.”
Even though they failed to cover the Abedin email calling it a "mess," ABC World News Tonight actually had a report from what appears to be that same Clinton Foundation event in Morocco in 2015. Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross interviewed Bill Clinton from the event in Morocco on May 4, 2015 on the issue of potential conflicts of interest with the foundation. According to the leaked emails, Hillary Clinton was set to attend the event from May 5 to 7.
CBS and NBC: 177 seconds
ABC Ignores
An email released on October 25 showed Cheryl Mills fretting to Podesta about President Obama’s false statement that he learned about Hillary’s private server when the news stories first broke. "We need to clean this up -- he has emails from her -- they do not say state.gov."
CBS and NBC: 143 seconds
ABC Ignores
While all three networks are guilty of ignoring or downplaying WikiLeaks revelations, ABC has been the worst of the three. To date, out of the 13 important WikiLeaks revelations that NewsBusters has highlighted in three separate studies, ABC’s World News Tonight has covered only three. The first was an email in which then-chief adviser to Bill Clinton, Doug Band, complained that Chelsea Clinton was “acting like a spoiled brat kid who had nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing.” In addition, ABC covered an email in which Podesta referred to “needy Latinos” (as did CBS), and joined the other two broadcast networks in covering the release of excerpts of some of Clinton’s Wall Street speeches.
Still ignored completely? Any mention of the journalists that the emails revealed were colluding with the Clinton campaign.
