Legacy media, news apps buried bombshell Fauci diary revelations: report

After bombshell revelations came about from Dr. Anthony Fauci's diary entries, the largest media networks and news apps buried the story, effectively shielding Fauci from the release by Senator Rand Paul's office before the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was brought up on the hill to testify on Wednesday where he pleaded the Fifth 111 times, according to a new report from the Media Research Center.

An analysis from the MRC reveals that the coverage of Fauci's diary entries was scant to none on ABC, Apple News, CBS, Google News, MSN, and NBC. The diary entries detailed Fauci's thoughts on his media fame, the private acceptance of the theory that the COVID-19 virus did not come from a wet market, and many other revelations.

The ten stories that appeared on the networks and a total of 27 minutes of broadcast coverage were largely released on the day of the Wednesday hearing, which made the diary entries simple background information to the larger news of the day.

MRC President David Bozell said of the findings: "The Fauci diaries should have been one of the biggest stories of the year. Instead of investigating what the diaries revealed, the elitist media and the news apps went into full-blown protection mode.”

"They downplayed the bombshell disclosures before the hearing, then pivoted to portraying Fauci as the victim afterward. Rather than examining his own words about school closures, the lab-leak theory, media coordination, and his celebrity status, viewers were served stories about a ‘fiery’ and ‘partisan’ hearing. It’s another reminder that when one of their own is under scrutiny, the legacy media’s first instinct isn’t to inform the public, it is to protect the establishment," he added.

On ABC's flagship morning and evening programs, Good Morning America and World News Tonight, MRC found that the programming spent only five and a half minutes on the Fauci diary entries.

At CBS, their broadcast programming, CBS Mornings and the CBS Evening News, only aired reporting on the diary entries for 14 minutes.

On NBC News, Wednesday's "Today" program claimed that Fauci has always been "open to the lab-leak theory" and said that the hearing was going to be surrounding “private reflections that are now gaining attention after a Republican senator posted them online."

Fauci, however, had logged the diary entries on a government computer, hardly private compared to a written journal.

On the three large news apps, Google News had just four stories in an hour and a half after the hearings with Fauci ended. The stories were from NBC News, Politico, the Associated Press, and Fox News. The Fox story only lasted on Google's home news feed after an hour, according to MRC.

Apple News had one story right after the hearing and had two others the following morning. MSN shared just one story after the hearing took place and none on Thursday afternoon.