The Democratic wins in Virginia and New Jersey have some in the news media writing the epitaph of the Republican Party. We’ve been here before post-2008. Yet, prior to the 2017 elections, former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee dropped a bombshell when she admitted that, indeed, the 2016 primaries were rigged for Hillary Clinton. It caused upheaval among top Democrats. Guy broke it down last week:
In her forthcoming book, former DNC chair Donna Brazile absolutely unloads on her party, blasting Barack Obama for decimating the DNC's finances, savaging the leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and confirming that yes, Hillary Clinton's campaign had the party in its pocket long before she was its nominee. You'll likely recall Donald Trump's frequent play to Bernie supporters during the general election, claiming that the Democratic establishment "rigged" the nominating process against Sanders and for Clinton.
You would think that such a brazen admission about the primaries being tilted would at least have a few seconds on the Big Three—ABC, NBC, and CBS—especially after all the groundless allegations that the 2016 election was tilted by the Russians to favor Trump. Well, that apparently wasn’t enough to make the cut. It was a total blackout during their November 2 evening broadcasts. Only Univision devoted two minutes and 30 seconds to the story (via MRC):
Even though it seemed like a plot in House of Cards, the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) had a complete blackout of any mention of the news during their evening broadcasts.
The reason the networks wanted to keep Brazile’s findings secret was simple: They didn’t want to ruin their narrative that Clinton was a pure angel who was a victim of Donald Trump and Russian collusion. But in recent weeks, it had come out that Clinton had the DNC in her pocket and they both were funneling money to Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele so they could work with Russian agents to get dirt on Donald Trump.
For the Spanish-language networks, NBC-owned Telemundo followed the example and omitted Brazile from their broadcast. In stark contrast, Univision was the only one to mention the Brazile revelation and dedicated two minutes and 30 seconds to it.
Joe Concha of The Hill added that the networks opted to cover the Russian probe led by Robert Mueller instead:
The broadcast evening newscasts on three major networks on Thursday didn't mention bombshell revelations by former Democratic National Committee interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile.
[…]
"ABC's World News Tonight," "NBC Nightly News" and "CBS Evening News" all didn't report the allegations by Brazile on Thursday evening despite it receiving considerable coverage on cable news and in print and online media.
[…]
Despite the Brazile blackout, the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts all featured reports on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and the recent indictments of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate, Richard Gates.
The so-called Big Three evening newscasts draw more than 20 million viewers combined on a nightly basis.
Yeah—I know it’s par for the course regarding liberal media bias, but it never hurts to be reminded of it. If this story involved a Republican and the Republican National Committee, you could go all-in on the media devoting a considerable chunk of time to this, along with the ongoing narrative that the GOP is in a state of civil war.
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