By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--March 13, 2018
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CBS’s “Evening News” spent only 31 seconds on the story, ABC’s “World News Tonight” covered the news for 27 seconds and NBC’s “Nightly News” didn’t even mention the news, according to the Media Research Center. The mainstream media has spent months agonizing over alleged collusion, but the big three broadcast networks dedicated a total of 58 minutes to the committee’s findings. It will be interesting to see if the Democrats on the House panel, who are expected to put out their own report, receive more airtime. MRC analyst Nicholas Fondacaro noted that ABC’s White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl appeared “almost irritated” by the findings. “These are the Republicans that control that committee… the finding is hardly surprising,” Karl said on ABC’s newscast. “Given how partisan that committee is, it's not going to have any impact on the overall debate over Russia.”Let's ask a question about that statement strictly from a journalistic perspective: Why does it matter if it will "have any impact on the overall debate"? Isn't it news simply that it happened, regardless of whether you think anyone will be influenced by it?
Republican lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee have drafted a report saying the panel’s yearlong probe into Russian election interference found no evidence that Moscow colluded with Donald Trump’s campaign or that the Kremlin favored Mr. Trump in the 2016 race.
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The panel found “bad judgment” and some “inappropriate meetings” between members of the Trump campaign and Russians, but no sign that those amounted to collusion, said Rep. Mike Conaway (R., Texas), who has been heading the probe since last spring. Mr. Conaway cited a much-scrutinized June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York between a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin and top Trump campaign aides, including one of Mr. Trump’s sons and his son-in-law. “That meeting should never have taken place,” Mr. Conaway said. “But we can’t find anything that leads us to a collusion string.” In the 150-page draft report, which committee Democrats haven’t seen yet, Republicans wrote that Russia carried out an “active measures” campaign in the 2016 election and was likely to do so again in future elections, but said they saw no sign that Moscow was seeking to help Mr. Trump, Mr. Conaway said. The panel’s top Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, in a statement Monday evening, called Republicans’ announcement a “tragic milestone for this Congress” and “yet another capitulation to the executive branch.” “By ending its oversight role in the only authorized investigation in the House, the Majority has placed the interests of protecting the President over protecting the country, and history will judge its actions harshly,” Mr. Schiff said. He said Republicans on the committee had conducted a “fundamentally unserious investigative process.”
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