This morning, RedState’s “Sister Toldjah” wrote that “Brian Stelter’s Hot Take On ABC/Epstein Story Is Everything Wrong With Journalism And Media ‘Firefighters’ Today:” “Tuesday’s video clip caused widespread outrage, particularly on the right, with many commentators using it to stoke hatred of the media writ large,” Stelter wrote in his newsletter last night.
Just to review: ABC News’ public face is George Stephanopoulos, the former communications director for Bill Clinton. In 2015, Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, which the Sunlight Foundation has described as a “slush fund for the Clintons” — which Jeffrey Epstein claimed he co-founded in a 2007 letter “written by high-powered lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt.” Court documents “obtained by Fox News in 2016 showed that Clinton took at least 26 trips flying aboard Epstein’s private jet, known as the ‘Lolita Express,’ and apparently ditched his Secret Service detail on some of the excursions.” The New York Times reported in July that “A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise. In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida prison, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal.”
Yesterday, after O’Keefe’s video dropped, featuring ABC’s Amy Robach complaining that management spiked her 2016 story on Epstein and Clinton, David Harsanyi wrote: “ABC’s Excuse for Failing to Report on Jeffrey Epstein Makes Absolutely No Sense.” Three years ago, “Bill Clinton’s wife was in the midst of her presidential run. One imagines that a story detailing her husband’s vacations to a pedophile’s island retreat might have been newsworthy. By the way, has Robach wrapped up that reporting on Clinton, yet?”
So of course, “CNN’s self-styled media firefighter Brian Stelter” goes with the “Republicans pounce!” angle.
By the afternoon, “ABC News Executives Believe They Have Identified The Former Employee Who Accessed Amy Robach Hot Mic Footage” of her complaining that ABC spiked her story of Jeffrey Epstein during the 2016 election year, HuffPost/New York Magazine contributor Yashar Ali wrote in his newsletter.
Two sources with knowledge of the situation tell me that ABC News executives know who the former employee is, but don’t know if that person leaked the footage to Project Veritas, the right-wing activist group, or if they shared it with others who leaked the footage.
What ABC News executives do know is that the former employee is now working at CBS News. I’m told that ABC News executives have informed their counterparts at CBS News that this person accessed the footage of Robach. It’s unclear if CBS News plans on taking any action against the employee.
Or to put it another way, “Funny this comes at a time we are discussing whistleblower protection. Who wants to bet the MSM will be consistent here? Me neither.”
And at Spectator USA, Chadwick Moore notes that Robach herself is hardly a heroine in all this:
If journalists wonder why they are so hated, look no further than Amy Robach herself. In the video, she is incensed by one thing: that she didn’t get credit for breaking the Epstein story. ‘We had everything,’ Robach says in the video. ‘I tried for three years to get it on, to no avail. And now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations and I freaking had all of it. I’m so pissed right now. Every day I get more and more pissed ’cause I’m just like, oh my God. What we had was unreal.’
Never mind that by killing the story her network potentially aided ‘the most prolific pedophile in American history,’ as she claims one of her sources said of Epstein. Never mind the untold number of girls’ lives potentially ruined in the years between 2016 and Epstein’s arrest. Robach also expresses zero outrage that her sources will never see their rapist brought to justice. Most disturbingly, she’s not the least bit horrified or disillusioned by how deep the corruption runs in her insulated media universe. It’s just another day in the office, where nothing matters more than her precious career.
As Moore goes on to write, that career, post ABC spiking her 2016 Epstein story, included segments filed from Windsor, England for Good Morning America “about the anticipation of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s first child. All the while, underneath this saccharine spectacle of morning news garbage, by her own admission she knew this family was protecting Prince Andrew.”
She then gave an equally fawning interview to Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton to promote their new book, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, helping to enrich a family whose patriarch, she believed, was raping trafficked girls. Although few can deny Hillary Clinton is ‘gutsy’ — murdering Epstein being only the latest example (kidding!) — did the irony strike Robach, as she sat across from the Clintons discussing courageous women? Did she think about the victims she interviewed just three years earlier, and how many more there might be, as she put on a smile and helped Bill’s biggest enabler, Hillary, sell books?
To possibly answer that question, elsewhere at PJM today, Stephen Kruiser explored “the Mainstream Media’s Sexual Predator Protection Racket”:
The mainstream media (news and entertainment) in this country have spent the past three years caterwauling about President Trump’s treatment of them. They bristle at the merest suggestion that they have been derelict in their duty.
In their telling of the story, they are brave souls, the lone purveyors of truth, and the only things standing between ORANGE MAN BAD and the utter demise of the Republic.
In reality, it turns out that they’re just a bunch of depraved sexual predator and pervert protectors.
How much so? Consider the length that the tentacles of ABC’s parent company’s reach. Setting aside Epstein’s relationship with Stephanopoulos’ former and arguably current boss, note that from 1993 until 2010, Disney owned Miramax Film Corp, whose co-chairman until 2005 was…Harvey Weinstein:
In a bold move to release a staggering 60 films next year, the Walt Disney Co. yesterday acquired leading independent film distributor Miramax Film Corp.
Terms were not disclosed, but the purchase price of privately held Miramax was considered to be in excess of $60 million. Miramax will operate under the Disney banner as an autonomous subsidiary.
Through such films as “sex, lies and videotape,” “The Crying Game” and “Enchanted April,” Miramax has emerged since its founding 13 years ago as a top purveyor of movies made outside the Hollywood system.
In recent years, its films have been both critical and commercial triumphs. “The Crying Game,” acquired for about $5 million, has grossed more than $60 million in domestic theaters.
Miramax has had limited success producing its own movies, instead buying distribution rights to finished films produced by others. It has frequently been cash-strapped and considered a public offering two years ago to raise much needed capital.
“Those problems are over with,” Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein said yesterday. He said Miramax now has Disney’s checkbook.
Gee, I wonder what else Harvey did with that checkbook?
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