Wednesday afternoon’s CNN Newsroom reported in two segments between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. Eastern that former Stormy Daniels attorney and liberal media boy toy Michael Avenatti was indicted in separate cases pertaining to his alleged extortion of Nike and alleged financial defrauding of Daniels.

Of course, CNN only footnoted the fact they had made their bed with Avenatti, hosting him an incredible 121 times between March 2017 and April 11, 2019 (which was the publication date of a study by the MRC’s Bill D’Agostino). In addition, host Brooke Baldwin and correspondent Sara Sidner ignored a Vanity Fair piece that revealed how he treated his adoring flock.

Before going to the piece from Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox, here was a portion of Sidner’s first report on the Avenatti indictments (click “expand”):

We knew that the Nike indictment would happen. This is the indictment by the Southern District of New York on charges that Michael Avenatti tried to extort Nike out of more than $20 million in exchange basically for not putting things out in the public due to some issues that he says that Nike was responsible for basically dealing with athletes and trying to bribe athletes to go to certain schools that he accused Nike of, but this is new. This is something we had not yet heard. This coming out today, in the U.S. Attorney's announcement there in the New York, he says that Michael Avenatti has also now been indicted on fraud and aggravated identity theft charges. Now what that has to do with is the book deal that he helped broker for his client. You will recognize her name, Stormy Daniels....[T]he U.S. Attorney is saying, look, he told her literary agent, had a signed piece of paper, and that signed piece of paper he said that Stormy Daniels had signed it, apparently and that the monies were to be given to him first and put into an account of his in lieu of giving it straight to her, somewhere around $140,000 plus that was involved in this particular case and that money was diverted to his account as opposed to being paid to Stormy Daniels in an advance on her book[.]

Guest and former New Jersey AG Meg Milgram followed Sidner with more bad news, noting that there’s now “three cases against him” with the other having been “the case in California in which he is alleged to have taken money that was supposed to go to a client who was badly injured and he took it all personally and just doled out a tiny bit to that individual over years and so, you know, I find his denials really sort of stunning in the face of how much evidence” prosecutors gathered.

In the following hour, Sidner reiterated the new charges, including how Avenatti was alleged to have forged Daniels’s signature during book deal negotiations. She also played a clip of an April interview she did with him in which he maintained he had lost money by representing Daniels.

It was only here that Sidner acknowledged the network’s role in promoting him (click “expand”):

SIDNER: So you heard him talking there about the amount of time spent. You will also remember that a lot of the time was also spent on networks like ours. He did a lot of publicity, a lot of talking about it and I asked him, look, didn't you get as much out of this as Stormy maybe not monetarily but certainly publicity-wise and he said, yes, I got a lot of publicity but that doesn't take the bills. So you hear there talking about money losses. The prosecutors saying, yeah, he might have lost money. We don't know. What we do know is they are accusing him of taking money that was not supposed to be his and then being dishonest about it with stormy Daniels, Brooke. BALDWIN: I hear him saying he'll be exonerated. We'll wait to see the facts to speak for themselves.

As stated at the top, CNN left out relevant points, such as Fox’s piece that told of how, after his first appearance (March 6 on NBC’s Today) triggered “a flurry of interviews that would keep him in green rooms and on cable-news sets and shuttling from one studio to the next in black cars for weeks” that made him “one of the most famous people in America, a cable-news pugilist who was actually going toe-to-toe with the president and drawing blood.”

Fox noted how positive the coverage was, including puff pieces about his level of attractiveness, but underneath that was his a “Trumpian...tension between his desire to be talked about incessantly and his crepey thin-skinned-ness if and when that talk turned to criticism, whether in the media or from strangers on Twitter.”

Here’s the relevant excerpt on his belligerent behavior when the cameras were off (click “expand”)

He would routinely respond to people who e-mailed him comments after he appeared on cable news, calling small-town lawyers who’d written him notes to chew them out for their remarks, according to people familiar with this practice. He berated Time magazine after it published a story quoting him saying that the next Democratic nominee would likely have to be a white man, demanding that the publication release the transcript of his interview. He once threatened The Daily Caller with a defamation suit, messaging the reporter that “this is the last warning.” His girlfriend through much of his year in the spotlight, Mareli Miniutti, recalled that he rarely put his phone down and would scroll through all of his Twitter mentions. “He would say, ‘Oh my god, this asshole said this and you know what I did? I fucking blocked that motherfucker.’ ” Behind the scenes, his behavior was even more volatile. “He had a terrible temper,” one prime-time anchor told me. “He never lost it with me, or really with any of the talent, as far as I know, because it was mostly for the bookers or the people who were behind the scenes. But he would tell people, ‘I’m going to fucking bury you. Why the fuck would you do that?’ if he didn’t like something.” A number of reporters recalled that he would physically invade their space. “His nose gets millimeters from your face and it’s clear he knows no boundaries,” one broadcast reporter and producer told me. Last spring, a print outlet published a story that called into question whether Avenatti had paid someone for information that would have helped his client. According to two people, he confronted the reporter on a cable set to express his displeasure and started to shout: “Fuck me once, shame on you.” People came up to her afterward to make sure she was O.K. “That’s how aggressive and alarming it was.” His temper often flared when producers and bookers tried to vet stories he was involved in. “It felt like we were enabling a total rage-oholic,” one booker told me. “It was pathological.”

Gee, it would have been nice if media janitor Brian Stelter and his team had dug up dirt on how Avenatti was treating the people who were worshipping at his feet. Unfortunately, Stelter was too busy doing just that.

To see the relevant transcript from May 22's CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, click “expand.”