by WorldTribune Staff, August 30, 2016

Hillary Clinton supporters in the major media have reported selected scandal stories about the Democratic presidential candidate regarded as partisan attacks.

But when the Associated Press released a blockbuster story concluding that more than half of the people Clinton met with as secretary of state gave donations to the Clinton Foundation, the same media organizations either went silent or ran articles from other outlets that tried to discredit the AP’s reporting.

So it is important to note that the same outlets that censored the AP story, such as Google, CNN, PBS and The New York Times, have all donated – in some cases up to seven figures – to the Clinton Foundation.

Carlos Slim, Chairman & CEO of Telmex, the largest New York Times shareholder, donated between $1 and $5 million. Google donated between $500K and $1 million. The parent company of CNN, Time Warner Inc., gave between $50k to $100k to the foundation. (Judy Woodruff, who serves as co-host and managing editor of PBS “NewsHour”, gave $250 to the foundation’s Clinton Haiti Relief Fund in 2010.)

This AP report has fueled allegations that Hillary Clinton was involved in a pay-to-play operation while secretary of state. But the story has been suppressed by Google in its searches.

When searches related to this story were entered into the Google web browser last week, results for “Clinton AP story” were limited to stories from leftwing publications discrediting the story — including this report from Vox: “The AP’s big expose on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess,” Observer.com reported.

The same terms in a Bing search yielded more balanced headlines, like “Clinton campaign, AP battle over story on foundation ties” from Market Watch.

When users typed “media coverage of the Clinton Foundation” into Google it returned results such as CNN’s “Associated Press Botches Hillary Clinton report and response.” In Bing, one gets articles such as “Mike Pence Slams the Media and Clinton Foundation in Virginia.”

The New York Times went a step further. The day after the AP story broke there was no mention of it in their entire paper. The story only made an appearance in the “paper of record” a week later — when Maggie Haberman finally mentioned that “[Clinton] and her campaign have denounced an Associated Press report.”

On Aug. 28, CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter defended Clinton and attacked AP’s Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. Instead of questioning Clinton’s conduct at the State Department, Stelter questioned why the AP published the story in the first place and labeled it as “misleading.”

A report on Aug. 26 revealed that PBS’s “Newshour” removed negative comments about Clinton in Judy Woodruff’s interview with Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein. A Stein supporter discovered the edits after he compared the Facebook Live version with the broadcast and YouTube versions. The edits PBS removed from the interview included Stein’s criticism of Clinton’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Obamacare.

“Newshour” has done one report about the Clinton Foundation scandal in a softball piece titled “A glimpse inside operations at the Clinton Foundation.” In the segment, Woodruff’s co-host Hari Sreenivasan, conducted interviews with James Grimaldi of the Wall Street Journal, Columbia University’s Doug White and Clinton Foundation President Donna Shalala.

A Media Research Center study found that the Clinton Foundation “charity fraud” story has only received a total of four minutes and 24 seconds devoted to it from the three big networks this year.

In comparison, the incident in which Donald Trump allegedly pretended to be his own publicist — in 1991 — garnered eight times more coverage.