Down The Middle News: Lesley Stahl Says Fox News Didn’t Exist for Clinton Impeachment

In a “pre-game” section earlier than Wednesday’s Senate trial proceedings on CBSN, 60 Minutes correspondent mentioned variations between immediately’s impeachment effort and the 1999 Clinton impeachment. She asserted — wrongly — that there was no Fox Information in 1999, nevertheless it launched in October 1996.

REENA NINAN: While you take a look at president Clinton’s time and the impeachment trial then and also you evaluate it to the local weather proper now each for journalism, for media and for politics on Capitol Hill, what do you extract whenever you evaluate 21 years in the past to what’s going on immediately?

LESLEY STAHL: Properly, you convey up the media. After all there was no Twitter. Presidents would not be capable to remark whereas different witnesses have been testifying and being cross-examined. There was no Fox Information. I dont know? I do not assume so.

NINAN: No. [Double oops: Ninan was a Fox News Middle East correspondent.]

STAHL: So there was not this whole partisanship.

Baloney. Fast instance: In our e-book Whitewash, we recall Lesley Stahl gushing over Hillary Clinton on a December 28, 1998 CBS particular The Girls’ Residence Journal Most Fascinating Girls of 1998. Stahl praised Hillary standing by her sexually abusive man: “Why have been we so riveted by her efficiency?…she grew to become extra human, extra susceptible. There’s additionally one thing interesting about her loyalty, her standing by her man, and the dignity with which she has comported herself. We’re all grateful for grace within the midst of shame.“

MRC’s Wealthy Noyes jogs my memory she provided this Hillary reward in 2000 within the Philadelphia Inquirer: “I am endlessly fascinated by her….She’s so good. Just about each time I’ve seen her carry out, she has knocked my socks off.”

This from the girl who additionally proclaimed in 2000, “I had my opinions surgically eliminated once I grew to become a community correspondent.”

Stahl additionally informed Ninan CBS was “utterly neutral” and nonpartisan in Watergate!

Going again to Nixon’s time, we have been working, tv journalists have been working underneath one thing known as the Equity Doctrine. And we have been compelled to be utterly neutral and utterly nonpartisan. And whenever you activate cable immediately, there isn’t any drawback with folks stating their place politically, and commentingon the witnesses when it comes to their very own political bias. That’s very new!

This can be a baloney manufacturing facility. This is Stahl in her 1999 memoir Reporting Stay (shades of Sonia Sotomayor with the cake):

IN MARCH I organized a party for Choose [John] Sirica. We bought a cake and candles, lured him into the pressroom, and collectively — print reporters, newscasters, cameramen, radio techs, different judges, prosecutors, and courthouse secretaries — all of us yelled “Shock!” He liked it.

It appeared that it was Sirica and the courts, [Sam] Ervin and the Congress, and the press on one facet, Nixon on the opposite. However the president stored singling out the media. We have been portrayed as working in cahoots with the liberal Democrats, out to get him for political causes, which was nonsense. Reporters are equal alternative stalkers when an open wound is uncovered.