Fox News Solos on GOP Oversight Press Conference

Capitol Hill
(Image credit: Gary Arlen)

Among the major broadcast and cable news outlets, only Fox News Channel gave live coverage Wednesday (May 10) to a press conference called by Republican leadership of the House Oversight Committee to allege that President Joe Biden’s family enriched themselves via an influence-peddling scheme when Biden was vice president and which they say the vice president must have known about.

The White House has branded that House Committee probe “investigation-free” and filled with “absurd innuendo.”

Fox covered the press conference as breaking news, with live coverage of the entire conference and some preconference reporting on the issue and post-conference analysis.

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CNN and MSNBC provided no live coverage of the conference, instead reporting on the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s conviction of battery and defamation in a civil suit and the charges of wire fraud and more filed Tuesday by the Justice Department against Republican Rep. George Santos.

Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said that no one watching the press conference on C-SPAN or other networks would believe that the President did not know about the alleged money funneling.

In fact, while the Republican reps asserted that it was “a very, very important issue to the country” and “Pulitzer” material for reporters in the audience if they just followed the facts in the bank records the committee has received, none of C-SPAN’s three TV channels covered the press conference live, nor did any of the broadcast network news operations, instead sticking with their usual lineups of local or national morning shows.

Comer accused media outlets of not doing their jobs as investigative reporters by not pressing the president on the issue of his family receiving money from foreign interests, an allegation Biden has repeatedly denied.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.