FAIR: Blackout on Manning

http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/07/17/bradley-manning-is-not-a-royal-baby/

"With a Royal Baby Due, News Outlets Are on High Alert" reported the New York Times (7/14/13) in a piece detailing the extensive planning that TV networks have done in order to cover the any-day-now arrival of the child of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

The Times said it "will be a spectacle unlike any other in the modern media age"; the ABC website has a special section ("sponsored by Nestlé&quot , while "NBC News has a site called RoyalBabyGuess.com, asking for predictions about name, birth time and weight. To make it more fun, the people whose guesses come closest might be mentioned on the Today show." Both networks are sending anchors to cover the big event.

You can compare this treatment to an array of other, legitimately more important events in the world, of course. It's not hard to come up with a list of things that are of greater consequence.

How about the trial of Bradley Manning? It only requires a trip to a military courtroom in Ft. Meade, Maryland. No corporations are likely to sponsor the Official Bradley Manning Trial website, but it's impossible to argue that Manning isn't news.

But network TV news has made that decision already.

As I noted before (FAIR Blog, 6/4/13) the evening newscasts briefly mentioned the start of the trial– with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams calling it the "court martial of the man who may have put U.S. military secrets in the hands of Osama bin Laden."

Inflammatory, sure– and also apparently the last time the trial was mentioned on NBC Nightly News. A similar brief summary aired on NBC's Today.

The other networks were hardly any better. On ABC's Good Morning America (6/4/13), viewers were told that Manning was an "Army private charged with the biggest leak of classified information in US history." But apparently the biggest leak ever wasn't big enough to merit much additional coverage; the only other mention of the trial on ABC came because WikiLeaks' Julian Assange brought it up during an interview on the Sunday show This Week (6/30/13).

CBS Evening News briefly mentioned the Manning trial on June 3, but has never talked about it since then. The day before the CBS show Sunday Morning reported (6/2/13) this:

There is a look at the week ahead on our Sunday Morning calendar. Monday, the court-martial begins on remaining charges against Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of passing government secrets to the WikiLeaks website. On Tuesday, Doctor Ruth Westheimer celebrates her eighty-fifth birthday. After fleeing Nazi Germany in her youth, Westheimer found success as a media sex expert.

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