With just over three years until the 2016 election, the Republicans have already had it with the lame-stream media’s bias toward Hillary Clinton. Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, fired a warning shot to the major networks this morning in the form of open letters to NBC and CNN, warning them not to air planned shows — a miniseries and documentary, respectively — about Clinton. “If you have not agreed to pull this programming prior to the start of the RNC’s Summer Meeting on August 14,” he wrote, alerting the world that the RNC has a meeting this month, “I will seek a binding vote of the RNC stating that the committee will neither partner with you in the 2016 primary debates nor sanction primary debates which you sponsor.”
Priebus expressed his “deep disappointment” and called the Clinton specials a “thinly-veiled attempt at putting a thumb on the scales of the 2016 presidential election.” He added, “Your credibility as a supposedly unbiased news network will most certainly be jeopardized by the decision to show political favoritism and produce an extended commercial for Secretary Clinton’s nascent campaign.” (For NBC, he included a special dig, claiming the network is “already damaged by the partisanship of MSNBC.”)
Both networks, anticipating these complaints, insisted last week that the news side of each operation will have nothing to do with the Clinton programs. “So save your complaints,” tweeted NBC News political director Chuck Todd. Republicans, of course, are just getting started.
