Andrew Sullivan noted today, “If it weren’t for the Republican debate, the death of Christianist Falwell, and the continuing U.S. Attorneys scandal, the Comey testimony would, I think, have been a huge story.”
I assume Andrew means it would have been treated as a huge story — on the merits, Comey’s testimony is a jaw-dropper, whether the traditional media understands that or not. On the whole, I should note that print coverage has been quite strong. Newspapers were a little slower than the blogs at recognizing the significance of what Comey had to say, but as Dahlia Lithwick noted, “It took a day, but the newspapers finally caught up to the bloggers.”
Then, there’s the broadcast media, parts of which still haven’t caught up.
ABC and CBS still have not reported — on either their evening news or morning news broadcasts — former deputy attorney general James B. Comey’s account of what NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams May 15 called a “rare glimpse of a high-level, late-night power struggle” over the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic wiretapping program. As NBC Nightly News justice correspondent Pete Williams reported May 15, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card attempted to pressure then-Attorney General John Ashcroft “at his [hospital] bedside … to approve an extension of the secret NSA warrantless eavesdropping program over strong Justice Department objections,” as Media Matters for America has noted.
Media Matters noted this yesterday afternoon, so I checked to see if either ABC or CBS noted the story at all last night. They didn’t.
The story has a little bit of everything — White House scandal, dramatic confrontation, stunning testimony, DC buzz, front-page articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times … what, exactly, is ABC and CBS waiting for?
As Jon Stewart told viewers last night, “Apparently, the President of the United States sent his Chief of Staff and Legal Counsel to an I.C.U. to convince a drugged-up, pancreatically-inflamed John Ashcroft to subvert the Constitution…. What is going to take to make you actually ‘gulp’? Do these guys have to sodomize the Declaration of Independence in front of you? Obviously, this is an incredible story [with] incredible drama.”
Except, it’s not “obvious” to ABC and CBS, neither of which have mentioned the story to their viewers at all.
Once again, when The Daily Show is offering better news coverage of political events than ABC and CBS, one has to wonder when modern journalism is going to try to mount a comeback.