You know WikiLeaks is working when the Clinton News Network can no longer indulge its natural impulse to bury this story beneath a heap of Trump-trashing. Today’s announcement that the FBI is reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails doesn’t hurt either.
CNN is the home of helpful correspondent Chris Cuomo, who has become something of an infamous social media celebrity since notoriously stating that ordinary citizens caught combing through these Podesta e-mails were breaking the law.
Perhaps Cuomo knew his name was coming up in a future installment. Sure enough, this Thursday, Cuomo’s message to John Podesta was released. Under the subject line of “Sorry you can’t make it tomorrow,” the journalist writes somewhat enigmatically, “Really wish I could get some time with the secretary as well. Campaign has ignored every request. Odd?”
Yes, it’s odd alright. Just what kind of time was he looking for? And Cuomo seems justifiably downcast that Hillary’s team isn’t providing him with VIP service despite his best efforts.
He may not be alone, but Cuomo inadvertently became the personification of the biased, irrelevant, unsupported, tendentious reporting that has characterized the mainstream media’s full-frontal assault on Republican nominee Donald Trump and its habitual defence of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In a CNN segment that exploded all over cyberspace, Cuomo was introducing his audience to these damned arcane leaks that were proliferating everywhere but on CNN and other Democrat media outlets. Cuomo, with a straight face and steady voice, tried to explain what these Podesta e-mails were all about and how they might just have some relevance to the campaign. He then cautioned his audience to not try this at home because “remember,” he said, “it’s illegal to possess these e-mails” but that it’s “different for the media.”
Sure has been different for the media – at least most of them. The only major television outlet to cover WikiLeaks from their inception through their daily unfolding has been Fox News. The clear indication that President Obama knew all about Clinton’s private e-mail server long before “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports;” the details about foreign governments offering what used to be called bribes to secure meetings; the money that Bill Clinton was devouring from the Clinton Foundation – all of it seemed like a distant war to a media isolated from Clinton scandal.
Then Bob Woodward, who still commands respect from liberal scribes and editors for his historic Watergate investigative journalism, announced that the Clinton Foundation was clearly corrupt and it seemed like E.F. Hutton talked and the Democratic media started to listen.
Speaking of corrupt, Thursday night on Sean Hannity’s show former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described the WikiLeaks scandal as “ripping the scar off the largest amount of corruption in American history.” No hesitation there. He then suggested the elite media simply can’t ignore the evidence anymore because “this stuff’s getting so big and smelling so bad that I think they’re going to have a very hard time hiding from it.”
Gingrich had his own moment of emotional release this week when he engaged in a profoundly bitter argument with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, whose grandiose self-presentation and machine gun tempo of speaking has been sufficiently annoying to earn her the worst nighttime ratings at the network and a #FireMegynKelly hashtag on Twitter. Fed up with Trump being labeled a sexual predator, Gingrich suggested Kelly was “fascinated with sex.” He was enough of a gentleman not to mention all those lingerie shots of Kelly or her ringer circulating on social media.
But the frustration continues. Despite maintaining up to three speaking engagements a day, Trump was excoriated by all the major media outlets this week for doing a photo op in front of one of his hotels. According to CBS, the event raised questions in “some Republican circles: Is Trump more concerned with self-promotion than with victory?” That same day, aboard Air Hillary’s campaign jet, steely-eyed reporters forced Clinton to think on her feet with probing questions like “Have you succeeded in getting the American people to know you? Do you feel like they know the real you?” Yeah, tough crowd.
Well, as I’ve said before, fewer people are listening or caring what CBS wants to editorialize or if the national media seek to get cozy with Hillary. They’ve moved on – sidestepping the mainstream with the social media and asking the impertinent questions themselves.