Albeit obscenely late and buried on a Saturday afternoon, there was a small victory for those demanding TV news networks cover former Senate staffer Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden as CNN broke its on-air silence with a seven-minute-and-30-second segment.

The mea culpa came less than 24 hours after a bombshell story from The Intercept alleging Reade’s mother called into the August 11, 1993 Larry King Live on CNN and vaguely alluded to her daughter’s ordeal. Early Friday night, the Media Research Center quickly located, clipped, published, and tweeted the video, becoming the first outlet to share it with the world. Of course, CNN refused to give either site credit.

In the case of CNN’s case, CNN Newsroom host Fredricka Whitfield and national political correspondent M.J. Lee worked overtime to defend Biden, spending 40 percent of the report defending the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and take jabs at Reade’s credibility.

The moment came at 1:29 p.m. Eastern with Whitfield pivoting “to the 2020 campaign and why a video from 1993 is part of today’s political discussion” and asked Lee to “tell us how this video could relate to a sexual assault allegation made against Joe Biden dating to that time when he was a senator and first of all, M.J., can you bring us up to speed on the allegation itself.”

That’s quite the understatement. Before this. CNN.com had only two stories about Reade (one from just before the segment and then April 17, both penned by Lee).

Lee highlighted Reade’s background as a staffer and hilariously claimed that only “recently” had Reade “alleged that Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her many years ago” before touting how CNN only “interviewed Reade for the first time on the phone last night.”

April 25 marked one month since Reade’s more serious allegation came to light, so CNN has quite the broad definition of “recently.”

After briefing outlining the disturbing alleged assault, Lee insisted that “the Biden campaign denies this allegation and we will discuss sort of their full response in just a few minutes.”

Whitfield asked if there was “corroboration” and Lee replied by not crediting The Hill, The Intercept, or Rolling Stone, but how The New York Times and The Washington Post had “done some extensive reporting” with both papers having found corroborating witnesses (the former had a friend of Reade’s and the latter had her brother).

Again carrying water for Biden, Lee boasted that “according to The Times, they interviewed some two dozen people who worked with Biden in the early 1990s and none of them corroborated Tara Reade's allegation.” In this Me Too era (and as readers will recall), such leeway wasn’t afforded to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The report moved to Reade’s mother and the clip (which, again, did not cite the MRC) with Lee continuing to spin (click “expand”):

LEE: Well, Tara Reade's mother is a key figure in all of this because she is the one other person that Tara Reade says she told about the alleged sexual assault at the time. Now she died a few years ago so she is not somebody who can speak and corroborate any part of this story now, but what surfaced last night was a segment on CNN's Larry King Live from 1993 that appears to feature Tara Reade's mother's voice. Let's watch that first and then we can talk about it. [CALL ON LARRY KING LIVE, 08/11/93] LEE: Now what Tara Reade told CNN last night on the phone is that this is, in fact, her mother's voice that she feels certain about that and that some time after the alleged assault in 1993, her mother did tell her that she had called in to Larry King and Reade told CNN she was upset about that at the time because she didn't want her mother doing anything of that kind. Now to be clear, this woman's voice that we just heard, she only refers to problems related to her daughter and a prominent senator, but she doesn't name any names. She certainly doesn't mention any details, doesn't say anything about sexual harassment or sexual assault, so I think it's just very important that we be clear about what this clip does and does not show. It does seem to suggest that Tara Reade did share something with her mother that she found troubling about her experience of working with a senator.

Shorter Lee: Don’t assume anything! It could have been anyone!

The remaining two-plus-minutes were evoted to refuting Reade with Lee explaining that while the Biden campaign has yet to respond to Friday’s bombshell, they’ve released a statement decrying Reade’s tale as “untrue” (and a hilarious suck-up to the “independent press”). She also threw in a glowing statement from a former Biden staffer blasting the “clearly false allegations” that “are in complete contradiction to the inner workings of our Senate office and to the man I know.”

With CNN off the board, that leaves ABC and NBC as the cowardly outlets that have yet to utter a word about Reade.

To see the relevant transcript from April 25’s CNN Newsroom with Fredricka Whitfield, click “expand.”