Fox News Channel analyst and former anchor Brit Hume asserted Monday night that for Benghazi “to become the scandal it surely deserves to be will require another ingredient: Relentless news coverage of the kind the media typically avoid when the subject is someone or some cause they favor.”
He explained: “That’s why the Gosnell abortion horrors were played down for so long and that’s why the now discredited Benghazi talking points were treated as just an honest mistake.”
In contrast, “think back to the disputed claim by President George W. Bush that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa,” which “triggered a media firestorm that did much to advance the notion that Mr. Bush had lied the U.S. into Iraq.”
Hume wondered: “Now, suppose that administration had done what this one has on Benghazi?”
Hume’s commentary on the May 6 Special Report with Bret Baier:
Long experience teaches that highly anticipated congressional hearings often fail to it meet expectations. Witnesses don’t quite say in public what they told investigators ahead of time, congressional interrogators prove inept and unfocused. But if Wednesday’s Benghazi hearing lives up to its billing, the truth about what happened that night and the administration’s efforts to disguise it might, at last, begin to come out.
Yet for this case to become the scandal it surely deserves to be will require another ingredient: Relentless news coverage of the kind the media typically avoid when the subject is someone or some cause they favor. That’s why the Gosnell abortion horrors were played down for so long and that’s why the now discredited Benghazi talking points were treated as just an honest mistake.
Each new advanced tidbit from Wednesday’s witnesses make it clear that the State Department, CIA and White House deliberately concocted a Benghazi cover story was false in every nearly every particular. Now think back to the disputed claim by President George W. Bush that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa. It amounted to 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address and it was arguably true. But it triggered a media firestorm that did much to advance the notion that Mr. Bush had lied the U.S. into Iraq.
Now, suppose that administration had done what this one has on Benghazi?
-- Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here [1] to follow Brent Baker on Twitter.