Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, PBS NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill acted as a Democratic Party spokesperson when she hit Ben Carson for accusing the media of having a double standard in covering his personal biography.
Ifill dismissed Carson’s claim that no other presidential candidate had received the kind of scrutiny as he and proclaimed “[t]he interesting thing about the outsiders we talk about so much is that they all seem surprised what it takes to run for president. And what it takes to run for president is scrutiny. When Dr. Carson says there has never been scrutiny like there has been directed at him, that's just not so.”
Ifill continued to deflect Carson’s criticism of the media by asserting that Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama received just as much scrutiny from the press when in reality it was conservatives who were demanding the media do their job and properly vet the Democrats rather than give them a pass:
I mean, we were all there when Bill Clinton went through the whole thing with killing Vince Foster. With the airstrip in Mena, Arkansas, we’re still we're talking about Barack Obama's birth certificate years after he was president. There's always this scrutiny and each and every one of those times those folks hated it. They complained it. They felt like victims and of course this is the way Dr. Carson, who has great self-regard, as he deserves to because he accomplished a lot in life.
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt pushed back against Ifill’s assertion and explained that Carson’s “objection is the double standard. This week there is the NDA story in the Free Beacon. There is the story of Teneo refusing to answer. Mrs. Clinton is not being covered in the same way Ben Carson is being covered.”
While Ifill was quick to trumpet Clinton’s likely defense of her e-mail use, the PBS anchor failed to mention that the liberal media actually failed to cover any of the recent developments in the e-mail scandal, both positive and negative for the Democrat and instead complained that the supposed positive stories were being ignored: “Mrs. Clinton would say there was also a report saying those two e-mails that were supposed to be classified were not classified and nobody covered that.”
See relevant transcript below.
NBC’s Meet the Press
November 8, 2015
CHUCK TODD: Gwen, you've been on the trail a long time over the years. Personal stories. I guess that, to me the danger for Dr. Carson is the fact that his candidacy is built on biography and built on honesty.
GWEN IFILL: It is built on saying this is who I am, these are my bootstraps and we all admire that. The interesting thing about the outsiders we talk about so much is that they all seem surprised what it takes to run for president. And what it takes to run for president is scrutiny. When Dr. Carson says there has never been scrutiny like there has been directed at him, that's just not so.
I think -- I mean, we were all there when Bill Clinton went through the whole thing with killing Vince Foster. With the airstrip in Mena, Arkansas, we’re still we're talking about Barack Obama's birth certificate years after he was president.
There's always this scrutiny and each and every one of those times those folks hated it. They complained it. They felt like victims and of course this is the way Dr. Carson, who has great self-regard, as he deserves to because he accomplished a lot in life.
HUGH HEWITT: But his objection is the double standard. This week there is the NDA story in the Free Beacon. There is the story of Teneo refusing to answer. Mrs. Clinton is not being covered in the same way Ben Carson is being covered.
IFILL: And Mrs. Clinton would say there was also a report saying those two e-mails that were supposed to be classified were not classified and nobody covered that.
