CNN enjoyed a rare day-off from being the most despised name in broadcasting on Tuesday. The full brunt of the nation’s enduring anti-media animus got redirected at ABC News for a change following a leaked video from Project Veritas showing anchor Amy Robach on a hot mic. A frustrated Robach revealed that a full report she produced on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile ring — implicating Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew — had been ‘quashed’ by the network three years ago.
The leak dominated trending topics across social media. ABC News responded with the equivalent of a corporate eye-roll, releasing a blasé, half-assed statement claiming the report — despite victims on the record, flight logs, and a mountain of other evidence — didn’t pass the sniff test for good journalism. In her own statement after the leak, Robach echoed the network’s excuse nearly word for word, contradicting the footage that has since been viewed nearly four million times.
Some stories in the past year that have lived up to ABC News’s rigorous reporting standards, however, include a heartfelt sit down with Jussie Smollett where he was permitted to fake cry, unchallenged, to a nation that had already called his bluff; broadcasting footage from a gun range in Kentucky last month claiming it was a Syrian village under attack after the war hawks cried foul in response to President Trump’s troop withdrawal; and gladly handing a microphone to anyone with a vagina who’d come forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of leering at bit too lecherously 30 years ago over a game of beer pong.
If journalists wonder why they are so hated, look no further than Amy Robach herself. In the video, she is incensed by one thing: that she didn’t get credit for breaking the Epstein story. ‘We had everything,’ Robach says in the video. ‘I tried for three years to get it on, to no avail. And now it’s all coming out and it’s like these new revelations and I freaking had all of it. I’m so pissed right now. Every day I get more and more pissed ’cause I’m just like, oh my God. What we had was unreal.’
Never mind that by killing the story her network potentially aided ‘the most prolific pedophile in American history,’ as she claims one of her sources said of Epstein. Never mind the untold number of girls’ lives potentially ruined in the years between 2016 and Epstein’s arrest. Robach also expresses zero outrage that her sources will never see their rapist brought to justice. Most disturbingly, she’s not the least bit horrified or disillusioned by how deep the corruption runs in her insulated media universe. It’s just another day in the office, where nothing matters more than her precious career.
After Robach acquiesced to having her bombshell report killed, her career advanced within the network. In 2018 she became co-anchor of the prestigious 20/20 news magazine on ABC. In 2019, after admitting on the hot mic she believed the Clintons and the British royal family were both involved in Epstein’s pedo-ring, Robach did an excellent job of not appearing reluctant when she gave both families glowing media coverage on ABC News.
In May, she spent several days in Windsor, England, filing daily fluff pieces for Good Morning America about the anticipation of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s first child. All the while, underneath this saccharine spectacle of morning news garbage, by her own admission she knew this family was protecting Prince Andrew. If she had any moral quandary, given what she knew, about providing free PR to the royal family, she certainly didn’t show it. Robach was bubbly, dutiful, and all smiles.
She then gave an equally fawning interview to Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton to promote their new book, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, helping to enrich a family whose patriarch, she believed, was raping trafficked girls. Although few can deny Hillary Clinton is ‘gutsy’ — murdering Epstein being only the latest example (kidding!) — did the irony strike Robach, as she sat across from the Clintons discussing courageous women? Did she think about the victims she interviewed just three years earlier, and how many more there might be, as she put on a smile and helped Bill’s biggest enabler, Hillary, sell books?
Big, career-defining stories like Epstein can take years to produce. We don’t know when her investigation began, but in 2014 Robach had Kate Middleton’s brother on her show in a bizarre segment promoting his marshmallow business. Quid pro quo with the royal family was part of the game in the Epstein cover up, a strange development that foreign figureheads (who no one in this country cares too much about) would have such a stranglehold on American media. In the leaked audio this week, Robach claims the Palace ‘threatened us in a million different ways,’ adding ‘We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will that we — that also quashed the story.’
Instead of attempting to make amends with the American people, and earn trust, the American media is stuck in a psychotic loop of doubling down and further alienating themselves from the population. They continue to do it in the most petty ways. Mainstream media couldn’t be bothered to even acknowledge the source of the Robach leak, Project Veritas. Such a scrappy, troll-fueled operation is beneath mention for those who have the royal family on speed dial, it would seem. In the rare instance the networks did mention Project Veritas, they couldn’t resist adding a snide ‘right-wing activist group’ qualifier.
Anyone who initially championed Robach has probably reconsidered. She’s not worthy of our praise nor condemnation, as much as our pity. The establishment can’t function without its army of spineless egomaniacs, steered in any direction by dangling a carrot — the cogs, who will never know the joys of doing good, only the rewards of doing good for oneself.
