Eighteen years ago tonight, ABC News revealed that Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley had sent lewd text messages to several underage congressional pages. Confronted with the evidence, Foley resigned from office that very day. “In a statement, he said he was deeply sorry and apologized for letting down his family and the people of Florida,” ABC’s Brian Ross relayed on the September 29, 2006 World News.
The quick resignation of a Congressman who had not previously been a national figure should have pretty much ended the national media’s interest in the story. But ABC, CBS and NBC spent a huge amount of airtime over the following weeks trumpeting the scandal, the idea being that Foley’s bad behavior could bring down Republican candidates all across the country.
On October 1, World News Sunday anchor Dan Harris led off his newscast with what he called “a potentially massive metastasizing scandal just five weeks before Election Day.”
“It could be a major blow to the Republican Party, desperately trying to hold on to control of Congress in the coming midterm elections,” NBC’s Matt Lauer argued on Today the next morning.
“Could the Foley scandal cost Republicans the House?” wondered Robin Roberts over on ABC’s Good Morning America.
“Over the weekend, this issue became the number one issue in every congressional race in the country, and both Republicans and Democrats say it has the potential to cost Republicans the Congress,” George Stephanopoulos pushed that night on the October 2 World News.
“There’s no getting around it: The unraveling of the page scandal could be the undoing of some House Republican leaders, if not their hold on Congress,” CBS’s Gloria Borger touted on that night’s CBS Evening News. “One senior House Republican tells CBS News that this scandal ‘could be the congressional equivalent of Katrina.’”
On the October 3 Nightly News, NBC’s Tim Russert kept the drumbeat going, telling anchor Brian Williams: “Rank and file Republican members back home in their districts are in a high state of anxiety. One said to me today, ‘we came in as the guardians of family values. Unless our leaders fix this and fix it quickly, a lot of us could get taken down five weeks from today.’”
To be clear, this wasn’t a case of “fake news.” This was a real story about real wrongdoing by a high-ranking official in a position of trust, and there’s no question that it deserved national attention. But as the days wore on, it also became apparent the networks were providing massive coverage to Foley as a means of tainting the broader GOP.
By October 11, 2006, an MRC analysis showed NBC had churned out an astounding 56 stories on its morning and evening broadcasts. ABC, the network that broke the story, wasn’t far behind with 50, followed by CBS with 46 stories — all focused on a single Representative who had resigned his office and quit his re-election campaign on the very first day.
“Tonight, it’s still the talk of the town,” CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric chirped on October 6, a full week after the story broke. “Election day is about a month away now, and Republicans are worried about the fallout from the Foley page scandal. It is not going away.”
Five days later (October 11), ABC’s Chris Cuomo was still hammering. “Less than a month before the elections, and the Mark Foley scandal just keeps growing,” he insisted on Good Morning America. Reporter Jake Tapper quickly agreed: “This is the scandal that will not go away.”
Foley was guilty of sending sexually suggestive messages to teen boys. But in 1994 — another election year — Democratic Congressman Mel Reynolds was indicted for having sex with a 16-year-old girl, and asking her to get pictures of a 15-year-old Catholic high school girl he was hoping to recruit for a threesome. MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham computed that Reynolds’ indictment drew only three stories on the national networks: two on CBS, one on NBC, and none on ABC.
The evidently shameless Reynolds didn’t resign; he ran and won re-election that year. He was still in office during his 1995 trial, when he was convicted on 12 counts, including sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography. Total evening news coverage of Reynolds’ conviction: a meager 10 stories on NBC, five on CBS, and just one on ABC.
“There are obviously some differences in the two sex scandals. Foley’s Web interactions were with a congressional page, while Mel Reynolds was dealing with a minor in private. But Foley’s scandal is based on sex talk, while Reynolds not only had an active sex life with one teen, he was trying to add more teen sex partners,” Graham wrote in 2006.
Republicans lost the 2006 midterms, including Foley’s previously safe seat. Two years later, the new Democratic Representative from Florida’s 16th Congressional District, Tim Mahoney, was enmeshed in his own scandal, coughing up $121,000 to win the silence of Patricia Allen, a former mistress who was threatening to sue him.
ABC’s Brian Ross, whose coverage of Foley’s scandal won him a Peabody Award, broke the story online on October 9, 2008: “The affair between Mahoney and Allen began, according to the current and former staffers, in 2006 when Mahoney was campaigning for Congress against Foley, promising ‘a world that is safer, more moral.’”
Yet the same networks that cranked out more than 150 stories about Mahoney’s predecessor had no interest in a Democrat’s scandal. Total network coverage of Mahoney’s mistress pay-off: zero stories on NBC, zero on CBS and a couple of harmless sentences on a weekend edition of ABC’s Good Morning America.
A truly independent news media serve an invaluable function when they bring to light the wrongdoing of those in power. But when news organizations’ reporting varies wildly depending on the party of the offender — oceans of airtime for Republican wrongdoing, virtual silence for Democrats — even this basic function of journalism can be corrupted for the sake of election interference.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
