Why Did ABC Not Cover The Epstein Story?
This morning, Project Veritas--a project dedicated to exposing various mainstream journalists--leaked a hot microphone recording of ABC anchor Amy Robach saying the news network had spent the past three years stopping her from reporting on Jeffery Epstein.
I’ll start by noting that I’m not the biggest fan of Project Veritas and commonly find the things they “uncover,” to be not that big of a deal considering many of them aren’t well hidden anyway — they helped create the genre of walking into Planned Parenthood (which is known for providing abortions) and getting surprised that they provide abortions after all. However, considering they did give a full clip I’m willing to believe them this one time — even if I still don’t agree with what they think this means.
In my opinion, claims of media bias have been extremely overblown over the past many years — and that’s coming from someone who calls out media bias all the time. On the right, the claims really started entering mainstream discourse during the Nixon administration due to the media covering the Vietnam War and the various scandals Nixon got up to. This made it so less and less conservatives watched the mainstream media, which just made it more liberal as a result.
While the claims existed before hand, a number of them were just as shaky. Anyone remember that time people didn’t get why a New York based newspaper didn’t cover events in Russia?
Anyway, I bring all this up because I find these “media exposed,” stories, and organizations based around them, to be more tiring than anything else. Going through one person they don’t like after another repeating the exact same claims time and time again. As such, I’m only writing this article because this one clip has caused so much backlash (even those on the left have been spreading it around) that it needs to be put into proper context.
First off, ABC is not a 24 hour news network, it’s a normal channel that has news related television programs in the daily lineup. The most popular of these shows being Good Morning America, which has usually been concerned non-political and more based on pop-culture news. This is also true with many of there weekly news programs like 20/20 (which ran a story on seduction the same week TARP was being passed) and Nightline.
Any other ABC news program tends to only run for an hour, and if you want to cover a day’s news in an hour you have to really cram it in there. As such, many stories that would require longer explanations or include names and events most people wouldn’t recognize would be cut — left only for the people who care to find out on other networks.
Tell me, how many of you knew who Jeffery Epstein was until this year? Maybe some of you remember his conviction from back in 2008 (although with the election going on that year and the recession starting, most media was understandably talking about that first and foremost) however I doubt most of you could tell me anything other than the basics of the case without at least a quick Google search.
In fact, Robach said this was the reason ABC gave her in the tape these people keep circulating:
First of all I was told “who’s Jeffery Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.”
Well what do you know? It seems the people at ABC directly told us why they made this decision. Ratings, my dear boy, is what really chooses what the news decides to play — not some weird theory about George Stephanopoulos (who I’ve seen mentioned in more Tweets on this subject than Amy Robach, who actually made the statement).
Maybe you guys should actually try watching the more obscure stories if you want to see more of them.
