The Department of Justice on Thursday released the redacted findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which stated very clearly that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. No charges were recommended against the president but you wouldn’t have known it by the way commentators on cable and broadcast news were talking.
According to a Media Research analysis, the word impeachment was mentioned 309 times during coverage of the Mueller report on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC. And worse, this was only during a 24 hour period.
“In total, the word came up 309 times, with the vast majority (286) coming from cable networks CNN (148) and MSNBC (138),” the report states.
While anchors and talking heads jumped on the impeachment bandwagon, MRC found that congressional Democrats were more restrained than the programs on which they appeared.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell were particularly keen on discussing the prospect of impeachment. The term appeared a whopping 34 times during the one-hour The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. Interestingly, journalists also mentioned impeachment 34 times on Blitzer’s The Situation Room, but over the course of two hours, between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. EDT.
By the early afternoon, numerous pundits had begun referring to the Mueller report as “a road map for impeachment.” CNN’s Dana Bash used that catch phrase twice during the 12:00 p.m. EDT hour: “What he did here, as Pamela just laid out, is a road map, a ten-episode road map for really serious consideration for impeachment.” Hours later, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes opened his show with the same terminology. [...]
The closest any member of that party came to actually endorsing the idea on Thursday was when House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler was asked about the option during a press conference: “That’s one possibility. There are others.”
Yet journalists were not discouraged by the Democrats’ reticence to discuss removing the President from office. Given the media’s obsession with impeachment — even after Mueller found no collusion and declined to prosecute on obstruction — one has to wonder whether they’re even reading the same report as the rest of us. (Newsbusters)
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said on MSNBC Friday morning that it "may very well come to [impeachment] very soon."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren went as far as to call on the House to begin impeachment proceedings.
"To ignore a President’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in similar ways," she tweeted. "The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States."
This post has been updated.