Now that Joe Biden has appeared on Morning Joe to say Tara Reade, the woman who accused him of sexual assault, is a liar, a question: When will the American people hear her story?
Ben Smith, media columnist for the New York Times, asked that question Thursday in a piece that linked Reade to another woman the leftist media famously ignored: Juanita Broaddrick, who alleged that former President Bill Clinton raped her in 1978 when he was attorney general of Arkansas.
Broaddrick aside, Reade awaits her chance to be heard in a forum beyond that offered by leftist podcasters and, as Smith calls them, “anti-establishment” liberal websites such as The Intercept.
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It’s Happening Again
Noting that the media shamefully ignored Broaddrick, an imprudent decision that played into the hands of conservatives who say the media is a left-wing propaganda machine, Smith wrote that Reade has struggled to get airtime.
That struggle has continued even though two women and Reade’s mother, among others, corroborate her story. In 1993, Reade alleged in late March, Biden cornered somewhere on Capitol Hill and molested her.
Biden denied the allegation in a post on Medium.com and, again, on Morning Joe today in a rough interview with Mika Brzezinksi.
But when does Reade get a turn on Morning Joe? How about Chuck Todd’s Meet The Press? Or Anderson Cooper’s 360? Or Rachel Maddow’s program?
“The same thing [that happened to Broaddrick] is about to happen again,” Smith wrote.
Reporters have found other accounts that indicate that she has been telling her version of events for a long time. There are, as with Ms. Broaddrick, reasons to doubt her story; there aren’t good reasons not to hear her out. As The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, told me in an interview two weeks ago, Ms. Reade has “standing.”
And yet, Ms. Reade told me Wednesday that the only offers she’s had to appear on television have come from Fox News, including a call from the prime time host Sean Hannity. She has so far turned them down.
“I’ve been trying to just kind of wait to get someone in the middle,” she said. … “I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a progressive, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a Trump supporter.”
Though the nets have published stories about Reade, not one has “put her on camera.”
“They’re not offering to put me on TV — they’re just doing stories,” Reade told Smith. “No anchors, no nothing like that.” She’d most like to tell her story to a network television anchor she admires — CBS’s Gayle King is one, she said — but they haven’t called.
As for that “someone a little more up the middle,” as she described her ideal, that might be Chris Wallace of Fox News, Smith reported, citing a person who knows Reade and said the two were discussing the matter.
Commented Smith, “the booking would be a coup for the conservative network, and give its on-air hosts a club with which to beat a mainstream media that can’t quite explain why it won’t book Ms. Reade, while Julie Swetnick, a woman with a shaky claim against a Supreme Court nominee, got airtime during a prime time evening broadcast.”
Swetnick’s claim against that nominee, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wasn’t just “shaky.” It was absurd and proven false. She retracted it.
That said, while partisans like left-wing podcaster Katie Halper listened to and broadcast Reade’s claims, “There’s still no clear explanation, however, for why Ms. Reade hasn’t been on mainstream TV. Representatives for CNN and MSNBC declined to explain why they haven’t booked a woman who is, whether you believe her or not, one of the few newsmakers right now who could cut through the pandemic.”
Their posture is all the more strange because, at this point, it’s essentially symbolic. In 1999, you could argue that NBC’s decision to hold back Lisa Myers’s interview with Ms. Broaddrick had real political consequences: Taped in January, as the Senate took up impeachment charges against Mr. Clinton, it did not air until after the Senate voted not to convict the president in February…. Back then, the only way Americans were going to hear her voice was on television.
But these days, if you want to judge Ms. Reade’s story you can listen to her original podcast interview with Ms. Halper, or watch her on the populist Hill.TV online show “Rising,” or the leftist news program “Democracy Now!”
In other words, the media don’t have a good reason to ignore Reade, and a very good reason not to.
The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, whose interview with Halper led to a listener’s digging up the King video, told Smith the media are making a big mistake: “That the media isn’t more concerned about the image ignoring this story creates, and the fodder it gives to cynical actors like Donald Trump Jr., gleefully parading the media’s hypocrisy, suggests a potentially destructive lack of self-awareness.”
Smith concluded the obvious: The media can start reporting the story any time they want. “They could investigate and break news that supports or undermines” her claims, he wrote, “or they could give Ms. Reade herself a hearing.
And if they don’t?
Reade becomes another Broaddrick — another woman with a serious charge against a top Democrat that the media ignored, even as they vigorously, and viciously, pursued similar claims about Kavanaugh and President Trump.
Lisa Myers, the NBC reporter who interviewed Broaddrick, agreed.
“The rest of the mainstream media either ignored, dismissed or misrepresented her story, which was shameful,” she wrote to Smith. “Many things have damaged the credibility of the mainstream media, but the obvious double standard in coverage of sexual misconduct allegations against politicians is high on the list.”
Photo: ozanuysal/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
