On Tuesday, ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley declined to cover the latest in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal as the House Select Committee on Benghazi has requested a private meeting with the former Secretary of State while a separate deadline concerning her e-mail server approaches.
Days after the committee requested Clinton turn her private e-mail server over to an independent party for review, the panel looking into the deadly 2012 terrorist attack in Libya wants Clinton to sit for a private interview in addition to a public hearing by May 1 at the latest.
Following its most recent coverage of the e-mail scandal on Monday’s Today, NBC News aired a 28-second news brief during Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News concerning the committee’s latest request. Interim anchor Lester Holt read the following:
The Republican-led committee investigating the Benghazi attacks is now requesting a private interview with Hillary Clinton about the personal e-mail account she used exclusively as secretary of state. Her spokesman says she is ready to speak out, but only at a public hearing. Clinton has claimed that she only used one account for both personal and work e-mails because she only wanted to carry one device, but it was reported today that she e-mailed from at least two devices, her Blackberry and an iPad.
According to Michael Schmidt of The New York Times (who first broke the Clinton e-mail scandal on March 2):
The chairman of the House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks asked Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday to appear for a private interview about her exclusive use of a personal email account when she was secretary of state.
Mrs. Clinton’s “email arrangement with herself is highly unusual, if not unprecedented,” the committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, wrote in a letter to Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer Tuesday morning. He added that Mrs. Clinton’s disclosure last week that all of the emails from the personal account had been deleted “only exacerbates our need to better understand what the secretary did, when she did it and why she did it.”
The emails were on a server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. Mr. Gowdy had asked Mrs. Clinton to turn over that server to a neutral third party, like the State Department’s inspector general, to determine which emails were personal and which were government records.
As the Media Research Center’s Geoffrey Dickens reported, the networks have devoted nowhere near the attention to the news on March 27 that Clinton had wiped her e-mail server clean that compared to the coverage of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA):
From the morning of March 27 through March 30 evening the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks spent only 10 minutes and 15 seconds to the admission by Clinton’s own attorney that her State Department e-mails were wiped from the server that had been subpoenaed by Congress, but they devoted a whopping 35 minutes and 1 seconds to coverage of the Indiana religious freedom law.
The news brief that aired on March 31's NBC Nightly News is transcribed below.
NBC Nightly News
March 31, 2015
7:12 p.m. Eastern
[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE CAPTION: Clinton’s Emails]
HOLT: The Republican-led committee investigating the Benghazi attacks is now requesting a private interview with Hillary Clinton about the personal e-mail account she used exclusively as secretary of state. Her spokesman says she is ready to speak out, but only at a public hearing. Clinton has claimed that she only used one account for both personal and work e-mails because she only wanted to carry one device, but it was reported today that she e-mailed from at least two devices, her Blackberry and an iPad.
