WASHINGTON ― On Fox News, where it sometimes seems like the 2016 campaign never ended, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile’s allegation that the party tilted its nominating process in favor of Hillary Clinton received hours of coverage.
Brazile’s new book, in which she criticizes the party and says a fundraising agreement between the DNC and Clinton unfairly benefitted the Democratic nominee, also was widely reported in other media.
But on Fox, which largely ignored Tuesday’s Republican losses in state and local elections, the network was reporting mainstream media outlets failed to cover Brazile’s allegations.
“The radio silence from the media is really puzzling,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said in a “Fox & Friends” segment Thursday that asked “how will anti-Trump press cover DNC scandal?” “Not a single network — not ABC, NBC, CBS — devoted one second to these claims. It’s appalling.”
The “Fox & Friends” hosts concurred, nodding in approval as McEnany continued to assail media outlets for their supposed failure to cover Brazile’s claims.
“If this were a Republican revealing that the deck was stacked against all the other Republicans, and then somebody came out, who was running the RNC, and spilled all the beans, would that be a big story?” host Steve Doocy asked.
“It would be a huge story. It would be an explosive story,” McEnany responded. “But now they choose to ignore this because it’s the Democratic Party. It’s libel, it’s malicious, it’s not right. They spend so much breathless time covering this Russian campaign collusion conspiracy theory. And then they tell us, all the while, that all these really viable accusations against Hillary Clinton — from Uranium One, to the Clinton Foundation, now this at the DNC, the dossier — those are the real conspiracy theories. That’s what the media tells us.”
In truth, ABC, NBC and CBS, as well as CNN and MSNBC, all covered Brazile’s revelations, and several of the networks featured interviews with her. The networks also used Brazile’s book as a peg for stories about divisions within the Democratic Party and about Brazile herself, who has since walked back some of the more explosive claims in her book.
Even the “Fox & Friends” hosts alluded to some of this coverage earlier in Thursday’s show.
“Donna Brazile, have you heard? She has a book out,” Doocy said at the top of the 6 a.m. hour.
“She has been on every single network pushing this book,” responded “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt.
The exaggerated claim that mainstream media are ignoring Brazile’s book seems to have been repeated by other right-wing media. On the day Politico first published an excerpt of Brazile’s book last week, Breitbart wrote that “ABC, CBS, and NBC did not cover these revelations on their evening newscasts” that day.
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