On May 8th as the House committee hearing about the Benghazi attack occurred, you could have tuned through every major network with the notable exception of Fox News and (a) not found any coverage or (b) found so little coverage that you would not even have known it was occurring. Even C-SPAN dropped the ball, devoting that time period to the blathering in the Senate.
In a chart put forth by the Media Research Center, the disparity should be an embarrassment to MSNBC and CNN, but it clearly is not. In their view, Americans should not be informed of the way the U.S. ambassador in Libya and three defenders were completely abandoned by the White House, State Department, Department of Defense, and the CIA. One could have sat in the White House situation room and watched the attack as it took place.
The response of the liberal media to the hearing was captured in the following May 8th excerpt from Atlantic Online’s post by Elspeth Reeve:
“House Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa knows how to put on a show. Issa teased his Wednesday congressional hearing on Benghazi like a movie, tweeting movie poster-style photos with the hearing date and his face, as if he were an action star (right). The hearing was packed with emotional testimony from former State Department officials who were there the night the American consulate was attacked. Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz even started crying (below left) late in the afternoon as he questioned the witnesses, who, at that moment, were not crying. The Washington Post’s Ernesto Londofio describes it as "a riveting account of that frantic night." Politico’s Ginger Gibson said the "dramatic and personal stories… injected real emotion" into the hearing. "Do you hear the pain and the sadness?" Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday.
However, the hearing offered little to prove a cover-up of nefarious acts by the Obama administration. We already knew an anti-Islam movie did not inspire the attack. We already knew the consulate had requested more security.”
Such reporting is an insult to journalism, to those who lost their lives, to the men who were attached to the Libyan embassy and spent hours calling the White House and the State Department begging for some intervention, including a Special Forces team in Tripoli who were ultimately told to “stand down” and were “furious” that the very rescue mission they trained for had been thwarted.
The witnesses were at times emotional. They were career diplomats and security professionals. They had lost friends and colleagues, and then they had to watch as the President, the Secretary of State, and others in the Obama administration went about spreading a horrid, squalid lie that a “video” was the reason a force of terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda staged the attack on the anniversary of 9/11.
Those of us who watched the hearing on television learned that:
High-level staffers removed vital pieces of information tying terrorist organizations to attacks. They knew early on that radical Islamic terrorists participated in the attack.
The former Deputy Chief of Mission to Libya, Gregory Hicks, said in the hearing, “none of us should ever again experience what we went through in Tripoli and Benghazi on 9/11/2012.” He went on to say he had personally told former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at 2 a.m. the night of the attack that it was a terrorist attack.
Gregory Hicks also testified that Secretary Clinton's claiming the attack was incited by a YouTube video caused Libyan officials to hinder the FBI's arrival to the scene.