CNN Gives 30 Times More Coverage to Tabloid Stories Than Benghazi Hearing
On Wednesday evening, CNN barely covered the congressional hearing on
the Benghazi attack from earlier that afternoon. Instead, the network
provided wall-to-wall coverage of the Jodi Arias trial verdict and the
Cleveland kidnappings.
From the hours of 5 p.m. until 11 p.m. ET, CNN gave a whopping 4 hours,
9 minutes of coverage to the two crime stories, but a measly eight
minutes to Benghazi -- over 30 times more coverage. And three of CNN's
prime-time shows didn't even mention Benghazi.
The 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET hours of Anderson Cooper 360
featured over one hour and twenty minutes of material on Arias and the
Cleveland abduction, but not a second on the hearing. The 9 p.m. ET hour
of Piers Morgan Live aired over 40 minutes on the two stories, but completely ignored the Benghazi hearing.
Ironically, CNN's Wolf Blitzer admitted that the hearing was dwarfed by the tabloid crime stories: "It's been nearly lost amid in a lot of the glare today,
the breaking news coming out of Cleveland and Phoenix, but September's
deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was the subject
of a very important all-day hearing on Capitol Hill."
Unfortunately, Blitzer's colleagues didn't get the memo about this
"very important" hearing. Most of the prime time Benghazi coverage clustered at the
end of Blitzer's 6 p.m. ET hour of The Situation Room, in a 7
minute, 13 second-long story. Host Erin Burnett only spent 39 seconds on
the hearing in a news brief during the 7 p.m. ET hour. That was all the
coverage from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET.
Earlier in the day, CNN had provided over 17 minutes of live audio of the
Benghazi hearing before cutting away from it for the rest of the
afternoon. The network did again report on the hearing but never went
live. In contrast, Fox News gave viewers 108 minutes of live
coverage of the hearing.
CNN's Burnett even admitted that the Arias trial had become a "soap
opera" full of "salacious entertainment" that CNN was feeding a hungry
audience. "The fact of the matter is, this actually stopped being a
trial a long time ago. As BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins told us today, I'll
quote him, 'The Arias trial had every hallmark of a classic tabloid
story or a soap opera. A four-month long soap opera,'" Burnett
acknowledged.
"So, if you're one of the people who enjoyed the salacious
entertainment of the past four months, make sure you thank the good
people of Arizona for paying for it," she quipped.
