On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell and Gayle King applauded colleague Nancy Cordes for her "great question" to President Obama on Monday about a dishonest ad from a supporting super PAC that blamed Mitt Romney for a woman's cancer death. However, they failed to mention Cordes's earlier question on how Obama's campaign has "suggested that Mr. Romney might be a felon for the way that he handed over power of Bain Capital."
The President falsely claimed that "nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon" in his answer to Cordes, an additional detail that went unnoticed by the CBS on-air personalities. Stephanie Cutter, Obama's deputy campaign manager, made the felony suggestion on July 12, 2012: "Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people."
Fill-in anchor Jeff Glor noted the "rare news conference we got from the President yesterday, where he got a lot of questions about the tone of his campaign. He tried to distance himself from...the super PAC ad that suggested the death of a steelworker's wife was somehow because of Mitt Romney and what he did at Bain Capital." After playing a clip of the Democrat's specific answer on the Priorities USA ad, Glor turned to O'Donnell and asked, "Norah, he seems to skirt around it just a little bit. Why not just announce it and say this should never have been on the air?"
The soon-to-be CBS This Morning anchor, along with King, first went out of their way to compliment Cordes, and then proceeded to spotlight the consistent negative component of Obama's presidential campaigns:
KING: Yes, she did-
O'DONNELL: Why not, sort of, denounce this and say it should never have been on the air? I thought it was noteworthy the President knew that it had only aired just once. That's how he knows the level of detail, even though it's not his campaign that is running this ad.
Look, this is a question that Obama has to answer for, which is about the tone of the campaign. Many people believed that Obama was about hope and change in 2008. But it is true - he ran a very negative campaign in 2008 as well. There was a tough race. It was a tough race against Hillary Clinton, and it was a tough race against John McCain. And they are running another tough race again in 2012. So, you know, I think, as the word has been used, it's not patty-cake in politics. It wasn't in 2008, and it's not in 2012.
It's even more that bizarre that the morning show would ignore its own correspondent's question, when the previous evening, it made it on the air on CBS Evening News. But both times, the network failed to expose the President's false answer on the felony accusation made by his own campaign.
