NBC News’s Chuck Todd is correct when he says the Democratic Party’s efforts to flip two Senate seats in Georgia are going remarkably well.
The part that Todd neglects to mention is that these efforts have been aided in large part by the press, including their collective effort to ignore a scandal involving Democratic Georgia Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock, whose ex-wife, Ouleye Ndoye, is on tape alleging assault by her former spouse.
“The Republicans have the home field, and the Republicans should win this,” Todd said in his analysis of the Georgia runoff elections. “President Trump is the divider in chief here of his own party. On one hand, he’s calling these runoffs illegitimate. On the other hand, he says vote in an illegitimate election.”
He added, “The bottom line is this, Democrats have caught every break they needed here. Whether it’s the mishandling of the coronavirus relief by Mitch McConnell, whether it’s President Trump dividing the party, you name it, right? If you were to script how Democrats win both of these races, every single thing that the Republicans have done in this campaign, you would have asked for.”
It helps also that there has been a media blackout of the Warnock spousal abuse allegations.
Ndoye told Atlanta law enforcement officials in March that Warnock had run over her foot during a domestic dispute, according to a police report obtained by the Washington Examiner.
“All he cares about right now is his reputation” because of his Senate campaign, a tearful Ndoye says in footage recorded by a police body camera.
“I’ve tried to keep the way that he acts under wraps for a long time, and today, he crossed the line,” she added, tearing up. “So that is what is going on here. And he’s a great actor. He is phenomenal at putting on a really good show.”
The two were going through divorce negotiations at the time.
You would think that a story involving allegations of spousal abuse by a Senate candidate would be a top-tier nightly news story, especially from the same newsrooms that chased after every allegation of wrongdoing leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings. You would think that the newsrooms that won Pulitzers for their #MeToo coverage would be all over Ndoye’s on-camera remarks about the Georgia Senate candidate.
But you would be wrong.
Neither NBC, nor CBS, nor ABC has reported on her allegations. Neither has the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, or even the New Yorker. Each of these newsrooms, by the way, dedicated nonstop, wall-to-wall coverage to basically every allegation of sexual misconduct brought against Kavanaugh, regardless of how flimsy or absurd.
NBC News specifically published an exclusive report in 2018 detailing an anonymously written letter that alleged, with zero corroboration, that Kavanaugh was observed by an anonymous woman in 1998 to have pushed another anonymous woman. The NBC report bears four bylines.
Yet the same news outlet that deemed that “scoop” worthy of publication can’t find it to publish even a word on Ndoye’s allegations.
The New York Times, which won awards for its #MeToo reporting, published a glowing profile of Warnock on Saturday that mentions Ndoye by name — but only in the context of recounting her engagement to the Senate candidate. There is a nine-word sentence later in the story that mentions the couple filed for divorce in May 2019. That’s it.
Funny how priorities change.
