Table of Contents
Tim Graham
Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the internet era.
For the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, the partisan Democrats of our “legacy media” treated the Pelosi-picked panel on January 6 as a dominant story, worthy of hundreds of hours of television coverage, both live coverage of the hearings and breathless cycles of previews and reviews. Once Republicans took over the House, would we have predicted this kind of committee oversight coverage would go from Hero to Zero?
On March 20, the House Oversight Committee held public hearings that were supposed to feature live testimony by Hunter Biden. The GOP-led committee titled the hearing “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office,” which was already a turn-off for Biden-voter reporters.
That night NBC offered two minutes. ABC and CBS did nothing. In January, Hunter Biden pulled a stunt by showing up and demanding a public hearing, and the networks covered that. On February 28, Hunter showed up for a hearing behind closed doors, and the networks covered that. But when Hunter skipped the public hearing he allegedly wanted, they skipped the story?
Even those prestigious national newspapers – with the slogans about “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” and “Democracy Dies In Darkness” – offered a big fat zero in their print editions. Nothing on Joe Biden’s abuse of office was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal.
Then consider “public” broadcasting – the ones who have automatic and undeserved prestige because of their “for the people” branding. The PBS NewsHour offered nothing, not 10 hot seconds. They offered eight minutes on a potential government shutdown, so their journalists were working on Capitol Hill.
The taxpayer-funded hour also carried five minutes on the ‘controversial’ Texas border-enforcement law, five minutes on the Biden administration setting a timeline for ending the gasoline-powered automobile, and almost seven minutes on a Mississippi police ‘goon squad’ that brutalized some black men. ‘Systemic racism,’ always a staple.
National ‘Public’ Radio was a bad joke, as in their evening news show All Things Considered never considered a story on the Biden Abuses Office hearing. NPR’s homepage was topped the next morning by their hot story: new details on Rupert Murdoch’s British phone-hacking scandal of 2011. Their media reporter David Folkenflik files a hostile story on Murdoch or Fox News on a regular basis, like he was an operative being paid by MSNBC and CNN.
NPR had a Biden mention on their homepage. Their young White House reporter Deepa Shivaram had a TikTok-like video shoot on President Biden grabbing a trendy boba tea in Las Vegas under the headline “Food stops can tell you a lot about a campaign.” Shilling Shivaram cheerfully explained “Asian-Americans make up a critical voting bloc in Nevada,” and “Experts on food and politics say that Biden ordering this could also send a message to people who think he’s too old for the job.”
I scrolled all the way down the homepage looking for a Biden-hearing story, to no avail. At the very bottom, there was this news from the insect world: “Scientists studied how cicadas pee. Their insights could shed light on fluid dynamics.” This makes it easy to describe the quality of NPR’s coverage of the Biden family scandals. It’s a warm bucket of cicada urine.
