That’s not the way the networks acted in the fall of 2006, when the MRC demonstrated a real feeding frenzy in the case of Republican Rep. Mark Foley, who quickly resigned after ABC’s Brian Ross reported he’d sent lewd AOL instant messages to former congressional pages. In the first 12 days of that story, the networks “flooded the zone” with 152 stories (55 evening stories and 97 morning stories or segments).
By contrast, Democrat Weiner’s weeks of trying to avoid resignation didn’t draw a similar flood. In the first 12 days of the Weiner scandal (from May 29 through June 9), the networks filed only 56 stories (just 11 in the evening, 45 in the morning).
This includes partial stories, like Brian Williams introducing the scandal in a disdainful 20-second brief near the end of the June 3 newscast, in the midst of a news potpourri from politics to actresses who’d died. Williams lamented it was “the kind of thing that used to be people’s own business.” Williams did find what he thought was a real scandal on June 2: Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey taking a helicopter flight to his son’s soccer game.
Before Weiner declared on the afternoon of June 6 that he’d lied in denying the story that he sent lewd Twitter messages to young women, the networks had aired an even smaller sample: one evening news story each (counting NBC’s Williams brief) and 13 morning stories. By the time Weiner resigned on the afternoon of June 16 (after 19 days), the overall number still didn’t quite match our Foley number: 113 (21 evening stories and 92 in the morning.)
