When 'Unaccountably' = ABC's SOP

“ABC unaccountably excludes Bill Clinton from lineup of pols who led ‘double lives,’” W. Joseph Campbell writes at his Media Myth Blog:

ABC News offered yesterday a risible lineup of two-timing politicians that omitted Bill Clinton, the philandering 42nd president, but included Thomas Jefferson, about whom the evidence of sexual dalliance is thin at best.

ABC’s roster of “the top eight politicians who led double lives” was posted online and promised “a look at some … tawdry affairs and public scandals” — and how the politicians implicated “weathered the storm.”

In addition to Jefferson, ABC included Grover Cleveland, the U.S. president in the 1880s and 1890s who fathered a child out of wedlock, and Eliot Spitzer, who as governor of New York consorted with a high-priced call girl.

The ABC roster also included an obscure and mostly forgotten former politician, Vito Fossella, a five-term New York congressman who in 2008 acknowledged fathering a child in an extramarital affair.

Given that the likes of Fossella made the list, it’s inexplicable that Clinton was omitted.

No, it’s pretty much SOP at ABC, which both heavily edited 2006’s The Path to 9/11 to tone down the Clinton administration’s decision to not assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1998, and then has blocked the video’s release onto DVD since. (Recall whom the presumptive Democrat presidential frontrunner was in 2006.)

I’m not sure how environmentally friendly this sort of giant airbrush operation is, but no one should expect ABC to turn off the compressors anytime soon. And as I noted earlier this week, perhaps it’s entirely coincidental, but ABC had back-to-back hits on GOP presidential candidates, even as its favored presidential candidate was occupying some of its parent company’s prime real estate.