Appearing on Fox News’s The Kelly File Tuesday night, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie blasted the press over the stunning double standard of its obsession with Bridgegate versus its minimal coverage of a possible criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal: “I'm waiting for the nightly specials on other news networks. I'm waiting for the breathless front-page stories on The New York Times that they don't back off from every time Hillary Clinton yells at them....it's completely biased, unfair, disparate treatment.”
Host Megyn Kelly prompted the comment by wondering: “...a lot of attention on Hillary Clinton this week and on the referral of her e-mail scandal to the FBI to look into that. Did you see as much coverage of that as we did about a possible indictment of Chris Christie for the Bridgegate matter which did not come to fruition?”
Christie demanded: “And the fact is that this should be looked into against Hillary Clinton and, you know, there should be fair coverage of it.” He added: “There was completely overblown, biased, unfair coverage of what happened with me, and with her, they give her a pass.”
As Kelly noted, the networks were eager to suggest that Christie himself would be indicted for wrongdoing, flooding the airwaves with 88 minutes of coverage of Bridgegate in less than 48 hours in January of 2014.
However, when an investigation cleared Christie in December of that year, those same networks were far less interested. The CBS and NBC morning shows provided a mere 32 seconds to the development after the news broke, while ABC’s Good Morning America ignored it completely.
As Christie launched his presidential campaign in June, the networks reminded viewers that Bridgegate “fed” the Governor’s “image as a bully.”
