By Rich Noyes
It’s been ten days since Hillary Clinton, on a visit to India, disparaged the voters who elected Donald Trump as President in 2016. This weekend, some Democrats openly broke with Clinton over the comments, while the ex-candidate herself felt the need to engage in a bit of backpedaling in a Facebook message posted Saturday afternoon:
I understand how some of what I said upset people and can be misinterpreted. I meant no disrespect to any individual or group.
Given the blowback, you’d imagine that the broadcast networks would have found at least a few moments for this controversy. You’d be wrong. As of Monday morning, March 19, ABC, CBS and NBC have so far failed to mention Clinton’s comments on either their morning or evening news programs (although CBS did find a few seconds to talk about Clinton fracturing her wrist on the same trip).
NBC and ABC did squeeze in brief mentions on their Sunday shows, eight days after the original comments, while CBS’s Face the Nation continued to hide the entire mess from viewers.
On ABC, former Clinton campaign operative George Stephanopoulos played the most incendiary part of Clinton’s comments and then asked New Orleans Democratic Mayor Mitch Landrieu: “A lot of Democrats who are looking ahead to 2020 say we just should not be talking about the middle of the country like that.”
NBC’s Chuck Todd (a onetime campaign aide to Iowa liberal Tom Harkin) was milder, running only a brief snippet which left out Clinton’s suggestion of racism among Trump voters. He asked Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown: “What does she not get? Why do you think she viewed those voters that way?”
Including the politicians’ answers, ABC gave the controversy a whopping 80 seconds on This Week, while NBC’s Meet the Press clocked in at 87 seconds. And, in their Sunday night and Monday morning news programs, both networks resumed their silence.
Something tells me that if Donald Trump had [lost], traveled overseas and blamed feminists and minorities for the election of President Hillary Clinton, it would have been a much bigger story on these three broadcast outlets.
Editor’s note. This appeared at Newsbusters. Transcripts of the ABC and NBC coverage from the March 18 Sunday shows and the entire post can be read here.