Appearing on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday, New Jersey Governor and possible GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie slammed the media for its duplicity in the way they covered Hillary Clinton's email scandal as compared to their coverage of the Bridgegate scandal he was accused of fifteen months ago:
“If I had come out the day after the Bridgegate thing was announced and said, 'By the way, um, all my e-mails are on a private server and I deleted a whole bunch of them and I destroyed the server, but you need to take my word for it, the e-mails had nothing to do with the bridge stuff,' can you only imagine what the reaction would have been?”
Before Bridgegate, Christie was considered by many to be the leading candidate for the 2016 Republican nominee. But, since he was accused of closing lanes of the George Washington Bridge to get back at the Democratic mayor of Ft. Lee New Jersey for not endorsing him his reelection campaign, the New Jersey Governor has fallen far back in the polling. Based on the results of the legislative and Department of Justice investigation released just recently, Christie himself was not involved in the decision to close the lanes of the bridge.
The subject of media coverage came up when host Joe Kernen asked the Gov. Christie about the "knowing what we know now would you have gone into Iraq" question being asked of Republican candidates. Kernen asked why the media don't ask Democrats if they think we pulled out of Iraq too fast. Christie said that media bias is par for the course:
They should have to but that's not the liberal conventional wisdom, and if it's not the liberal conventional wisdom it's not going to be asked. Listen, the media, unfortunately, in my mind, I’ve seen this acutely in the last couple of years. Whatever is on the front page of "New York Times" is what they talk about. That's what they talk about. That's who they go to cocktail parties with. That's what they do. So, if you're frustrated by that, I apologize to you. But welcome to the real world. This is the way it goes.
"Squawk Box" co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin seemed to doubt Christie's contention and suggested that the media coverage has been terrible to "Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation for the past couple months." But, Christie pointed out the Hillary coverage has waned and didn't have the intensity of the coverage he faced about Bridgegate. And, now that he's been exonerated he wondered, where are the apologies from the media?
Today we don't talk about the e-mail situation with Secretary Clinton anymore like it went away. I do believe there is an absolute bias and a rush to judgment. You all know this. You saw the coverage of me 15 months ago. I was guilty. Guilty. I had done it. Now we're 15 months later, where are the apologies pouring in that not one thing I said on the day after the bridge situation has been proven to be wrong. So, all I’m saying to you is, has there been coverage of the e-mail situation with the secretary? Absolutely. But the intensity of the coverage and the relentlessness of the coverage is different and that's where the bias is revealed.
Christie is not exaggerating. On January 2014 MRC President Brent Bozell appeared on Fox's "Your World With Neil Cavuto and laid out the quantitative facts about the Bridgegate news coverage:
It's over a 48 hour period. Eighty seven minutes, 44 seconds devoted to Chris Christie. Nine reports on ABC, 12 reports on CBS, NBC had 13 reports. That's a tsunami. Now, let them defend it by saying this is an important issue. Okay. But you look at the IRS scandal and you see that since, since July of 2013, there has been a total of two minutes and 38 seconds devoted to the scandal, with one development after another after another on this, which is completely untouched by the same media who believed they need to spend two days worth of non-stop coverage on Chris Christie.