(Article by Geoffrey Dickens republished from NewsBusters.org)
For Wednesday, October 14 through the morning of October 19 MRC analysts looked at the ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning shows and their Sunday roundtable programs, plus ABC’s and NBC’s townhall events with Joe Biden and President Trump. Out of a total of 51 hours of news programming, there was less than 15 minutes (14 minutes, 15 seconds) spent on the latest scandals involving Joe Biden’s son.
ABC spent ZERO seconds on Hunter Biden.
NBC spent just 5 minutes, 2 seconds on Hunter’s emails. CBS led the broadcast networks with nine minutes and 13 seconds.
Even when journalists mentioned the story, they devoted much of their time to knocking it down.
Over the weekend, NBC Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd invited NBC News analyst and Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker to question the veracity of the Hunter Biden scandals, with Parker adding one of the released phone texts “actually makes Joe Biden seem like what voters already believe. A decent guy.”
NewsBusters’s Nicolas Fondacaro reported on a hack job by CBS’s Margaret Brennan:
During Sunday’s Face the Nation, host Margaret Brennan peppered former National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers with a request to comment on what she admitted was “speculation” Russia had stolen Hunter Biden’s emails to dump.
Leading up to her admission that what she was peddling about the Biden scandal was baseless, Brennan primed the pump by asking Rogers to discuss Russian efforts to sway the 2020 election with misinformation and even manipulation of vote counts:
“I want to get to your old line of work and your expertise on the intelligence front because we know U.S. intelligence says, right now, Russia is basically trying to manipulate the public, spread disinformation about the election specifically to hurt the Democratic candidate and some Kremlin-linked actors trying to boost the President. Can Russia, at this point, actually change the outcome of the election by altering votes? Do they have that capability?”
After Rogers shot down her suggestion that Russia would be manipulating vote totals for Trump, he noted that Russia was still trying to manipulate voters’ emotions via social media to drive people apart. Brennan saw the opportunity and pounced.
“To that point, you know, there has been a lot of speculation that this week some of the information about Joe Biden's son, Hunter, that has circulated in tabloid, The New York Post, may be the result of a hack and dump operation,” she declared. Meanwhile, CBS was among the first to push that “speculation” while the Biden campaign had not refuted the validity of the information.
Adding: “This is speculation at this point. That it could have come from Russian military hacking of a Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served. Do you see any justification for that speculation at this point?” But, Brennan’s hypothesis made no sense.
According to the Post report, the information on the computer in question contained a “12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.”
Why would the Ukrainian energy company Burisma have that video and those images, as Brennan suggested was taken from them? That's not to mention the emails confirmed by Fox News pertaining to Hunter's involvement with a Chinese firm.
For Rogers’ part, he didn’t know much about the case and didn’t like her speculation. “Again, my view would be let's let it play out, let’s investigate it, let's get some factual evidence, let’s get the Metadata, and let's see if this is accurate or not. I’m just not in a position to speculate. I’m not a fan of speculation,” he said as his host began to speak over him.
Brennan tried to salvage the CBS talking point by comparing the alleged Biden corruption to the Clinton campaign email scandal of 2016:
Well, it’s being compared to the hack and dump operation that happened, as you know, back in 2016. A lot of Democrats alleging that it is that. So, when you say you see Russia doing a disinformation and access -- spreading disinformation, is that the kind of thing you're talking about?
(For this study analysts looked at ABC’s World News Tonight, Good Morning America, ABC’s This Week and their 2-hour townhall event with Joe Biden; CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, CBS Sunday Morning and CBS’s Face the Nation; NBC Nightly News, NBC’s Today show, the Today show Third Hour, Sunday Today with Willie Geist, Meet the Press and their 1-hour townhall event with Donald Trump).
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