The Media Research Center’s Scott Whitlock grumbles in an Aug. 9 post:
The three network morning shows on Tuesday allowed a scant minute and 59 seconds to a lawsuit filed against Hillary Clinton by the grieving parents of Benghazi victims. This is out of a total of eight hours of possible air time. ABC, CBS and NBC continued their pattern of showing very little interest in Pat Smith, the mother who condemned Clinton at the Republican National Convention.
NBC’s four-hour-long Today allowed just 36 seconds to Smith’s wrongful death lawsuit. CBS This Morning managed 40 seconds and ABC’s Good Morning America provided 43 seconds. On CBS, Nancy Cordes quickly explained, “Charles Woods and Patricia Smith allege the attacks resulted from Clinton’s, quote, ‘extreme carelessness in handling confidential and classified information.’”
Whitlock, meanwhile, devoted zero seconds to explaining that the lawsuit is nothing more than a publicity stunt by a terrible lawyer, right-wing ambulance-chaser Larry Klayman.
Even Fox News host Steve Doocy admitted that the lawsuit is “obviously just to inflict as much political damage onto Hillary Clinton as they possibly could,” and Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano added, “Quite frankly, I don’t think either parts of this lawsuit are going to go — they’re certainly not going to go anywhere during the election campaign.” Right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham concurred, saying that “I think it’s going to be very difficult to demonstrate the causes of action they allege. … I think it’s very difficult to prove that Hillary’s actions were the proximate cause or direct cause of the deaths of your sons.”
The fact that even the MRC’s contemporaries agree the lawsuit has no legal merit makes Whitlock’s insistence that there is news value to it highly suspect, if not completely ridiculous.