In a Monday item on Fox News.com [1], Bret Baier revealed CBS's surreptitious posting of a previously-unreleased clip from Steve Kroft's September 12, 2012 interview of President Obama. During the nearly eight-week-old clip, Kroft pointed out something that Obama didn't say during his press conference earlier in the day on the Islamist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi: "This morning, you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word 'terrorism' in connection with the Libya attack. Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?"
The President didn't dispute the correspondent's contention, and replied that "it's too early to know exactly how this came about." Baier noted in his item that this response contradicts what the incumbent later stated about the terrorist attack, in particular, at the second presidential debate moderated by CNN's Candy Crowley.
It should be pointed out that CBS's own Jan Crawford filed a report [2] on the October 17, 2012 edition of CBS Evening News that exposed the deception of the President's claim at the second debate. This newly-released clip of Kroft's interview lends further support to what Crawford outlined - that "Mr. Obama didn't directly say the Libya attack qualified as one of those acts of terror. Earlier in his remarks, he seemed to suggest the attacks instead were triggered by an anti-Muslim video." She also spotlighted Crowley's role in assisting the Democrat's attempt to rewrite the timeline.
Near the end of his item, Baier wondered about CBS's decision to hold back on posting this new clip: "Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama's claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?"
The MRC's Rich Noyes provided an answer to that question in a Friday report [3], which documented that the Big Three networks, after first giving slanted coverage of the Benghazi attack, buried new developments on the story. Noyes concluded that "the shifting coverage provides a case study in how the elite media will skew an important story to aid the political interests of the liberal incumbent."
— Matthew Balan is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here [4].