Politics

White House press corps mum on Ryan’s call for Holder’s resignation, new Fast and Furious details

Matthew Boyle Investigative Reporter
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During Monday’s press gaggle, reporters did not ask White House press secretary Jay Carney or President Barack Obama re-election campaign press secretary Jen Psaki about damning new details related to Operation Fast and Furious that have emerged since the weekend.

On Sunday, GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan called for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation — a major development in the gunwalking scandal and in the 2012 presidential campaign. No members of the press corps posed a question to Psaki about Ryan’s statement.

Also on Sunday, Spanish-language television network Univision aired an emotional investigation of Fast and Furious that put faces and names to victims of gunwalking violence in Mexico. The report documented a massacre of teenagers by drug cartel criminals using weapons trafficked to Mexico by the Obama administration.

Despite that, no reporters asked Carney about those developments. There was also no mention during Monday’s press gaggle of  why, despite pressure from Congress, President Obama has not offered an apology to Mexicans for the carnage.

Likeise, no reporter asked Psaki to gauge what impact the Univision report may have on Hispanic voters ahead of the November election.

Instead, reporters’ limited opportunities to query the administration were largely devoted to question about how Obama is preparing for Wednesday evening’s presidential debate against Mitt Romney, along with questions related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

In addition, the conservative Media Research Center found that the major news networks — ABC, NBC and CBS — didn’t devote any time in their morning or evening news broadcasts to coverage of the scandal.

MRC president Brent Bozell said that the media’s decision to not cover these Fast and Furious developments is “another example of the media deliberately rigging this election.”

“The Obama administration provided guns to Mexican drug cartels, and the networks have the gall to ignore it,” Bozell said in a statement. “ABC, CBS and NBC have absolutely no excuse for spiking this explosive report, and are clearly doing so because it will damage Obama’s chances of re-election. Americans shouldn’t have to learn a second language to receive real investigative reporting.”

“The deaths of 14 more Mexican youths and the discovery of 57 more guns because of this deadly Fast and Furious scandal is news any way you look at it, and the networks completely ignored it,” Bozell added. “ABC relegating this news to their website is a pathetic cop out. It’s despicable that the networks simply will not tell the truth about Fast and Furious because they know that it will hurt their chosen candidate.”

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