The MRC’s Director of Media Analysis and Newsbusters Executive Editor Tim Graham appeared on Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor on Wednesday night to discuss media coverage – and lack thereof – of former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's criticisms of President Obama's foreign policy, particularly as regards the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Commenting on Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Panetta from Tuesday night, Graham told O'Reilly and FNC’s MediaBuzz host Howard Kurtz that “[t]his is a devastating interview for Obama. I think that's one of the reasons why they don't want to pay attention to it.”
Graham pointed out that when the former Secretary of Defense gave his first interview to CBS’s 60 Minutes, neither one of the other two major broadcast networks (ABC or NBC) covered it and the result was the same with O’Reilly’s interview.
Speaking on how “especially upsetting again” it was that none of the networks joined O’Reilly in asking Panetta about the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack in Benghazi. On what Panetta said about Benghazi, Graham thought that “Panetta's answers on that were really weak.”
When asked at the end of the segment by O’Reilly whether the liberal media knows that the President is failing on foreign policy, Graham responded that:
I do think they know he’s been ineffective and they’re trying not to talk about it. I mean, and when you bring up these others guys, when Paul O’Neill or Scott McCellan came out against [then-President George W.] Bush, they loved them. They couldn’t get enough of that, and now they’re sitting here saying this guy [Panetta] is disloyal.
