When, ten minutes into the October 28 Meet the Press, guest panelist Carly Fiorina brought up Benghazi, host David Gregory cut her off, but promised: “We’ll get to Libya a little bit later.” The show proceeded for nearly another 50 minutes without another mention of Libya.
A full seven days later -- 168 hours to be precise -- Gregory made good on his belated pledge, raising Benghazi with Obama operative David Plouffe just over ten minutes into the November 4 Meet the Press, but only after trying to discredit administration critics: “A lot of misinformation about this and a politicization of this in the final days.”
He then asked about what occurred before the attacks, not the much more damning efforts by Obama officials to cover up what happened afterward: “Why was security at our consulate so inadequate, particularly when there had been warnings in advance about an attack on the consulate?”
Neither ABC’s This Week nor CBS’s Face the Nation touched Libya/Benghazi.
From Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC:
DAVID GREGORY: Before you go, I want to ask you about what is still both a highly politicized but very important question about this raid in Libya on our consulate in Benghazi that killed our ambassador Chris Stevens. A lot of misinformation about this and a politicization of this in the final days. But still important questions that seem to boil down to this: Why was security at our consulate so inadequate, particularly when there had been warnings in advance about an attack on the consulate? Why was there such little force nearby to respond to the kind of attack that ultimately took place?
DAVID PLOUFFE: Well, David, that’s exactly why the State Department has an accountability review board that’s going to -- right now is undertaking a very thorough investigation. Obviously, as facts come out, those have been released. But, you know, Admiral Mullen, Mr. Pickering, these are respected leaders who are going to see what happened, what lessons can we learn from this.
GREGORY: Why not put out the facts before the election? Are you deliberately waiting until after election day before you respond to these questions in a detailed fashion?
PLOUFFE: Absolutely not...
A week ago [1]:
Carly Fiorina, a guest panelist on NBC’s Meet the Press as a surrogate for the Romney campaign, brought up Libya unprompted: “On the issue of trust, what is going on with regard to Libya. I mean, here we have an extraordinary thing where the President comes out on Friday and says I directed that everything possible should be done to aid our embassy under attack. That attack went on for seven hours, we now know that Secretary of Defense saying he denied requests for help over that seven hours.”
Host David Gregory cut her off, but promised: “We’ll get to Libya a little bit later.” He never did. Fiorina’s was the last word on Libya during the program.
-- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here [2] to follow Brent Baker on Twitter.