Media top headlines September 23
In media news today, 'The View' co-host Joy Behar claims Hillary Clinton was the 'real victim' of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Trump sues The New York Times and Mary Trump for 100 million dollars, and the ACLU gets pummeled for altering a Ruth Bader Ginsburg abortion quote
The recent developments in the investigation spearheaded by Special Counsel John Durham is already a distant memory to the liberal networks after they spent years hyping the Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Democratic attorney Michael Sussmann was charged with lying to the FBI over allegedly not disclosing his ties to the Hillary Clinton campaign after pushing for an investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump's ties to Russia in 2016, specifically over a server connection between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.
This marked the second indictment to come from the Durham probe that is looking into the origins of the Russia investigation. Trump-era Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to investigate where the Trump-Russia collusion narrative came from in April 2019.
The coverage the Sussmann indictment received was fairly minimal across the five TV networks.
MSNBC'S RACHEL MADDOW MINIMIZES DURHAM PROBE INDICTMENT TIED TO FAKE TRUMP-RUSSIA STORY SHE PROMOTED
CBS and NBC offered zero coverage to the controversy last week while ABC addressed it once for roughly 70 seconds on "World News Tonight."
Meanwhile, CNN and MSNBC, the two cable networks that drove the Russian collusion narrative throughout the Trump presidency, minimized their coverage of the Durham probe.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who became a liberal icon in the Trump era for her unrepentant airtime discussing all things Russia, mocked the "outlandish" suggestion the Alfa Bank story was "fabricated" and a "product of a conspiracy theory orchestrated by the Clinton campaign and the Democrats and the ‘Deep State’ to frame Donald Trump," something the bank has since alleged in defamation lawsuits.
"And the Trump Justice Department appears to have sort of run with that," Maddow smirked on the eve of the indictment.
Maddow's primetime colleagues, Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell, skipped the subject entirely while CNN's Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon each addressed it once, according to Grabien transcripts.
Both MSNBC and CNN have already moved on. MSNBC's last mention of the Durham probe was Friday while CNN's most recent mention was on Sunday when "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter, CNN's left-wing media guru, attempted to downplay Durham's findings, calling the investigation a "total bust" despite how it is still ongoing.
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In the past week, only five individual programs on MSNBC mentioned the investigation while eight addressed the subject on CNN, a far cry from the wall-to-wall coverage every development in the Russia probe received.
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