The national media had a slow start to covering a highly consequential report that said Susan Rice, national security adviser in the Obama administration, requested names of Trump transition team members who were incidentally caught up in U.S. surveillance.
The report, published Monday by Eli Lake in Bloomberg View, said Rice was responsible for “unmasking” the identities of several of President Trump’s associates in intelligence reports.
Lake’s report, backed up by additional reporting by Fox News, could corroborate some of the White House’s claims that it was spied on by Obama officials during the transition period.
Though the spying story has been prominent for weeks, national news outlets were mostly passive in their coverage of Lake’s reporting.
The New York Times ran a story Monday evening that said the Rice news originated in “in conservative news media outlets,” though Bloomberg View is not a conservative publication.
The paper also said that the White House’s citing of the report was an attempt “to deflect Russian scrutiny.”
The Washington Post also did not cover Lake’s original report but instead covered White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s press briefing on Monday, wherein he accused the media of a “lack of interest” in the story.
The Post also ran a blog post by liberal writer Paul Waldman that said the Rice news a “fake scandal.”
The right-leaning NewsBusters website, which monitors mainstream media coverage, said that neither nightly newscast on NBC and ABC covered the Rice story.
NewsBusters said, however, that the story was covered on CBS, which cited anonymous sources that defended Rice’s behavior as “nothing improper.”
