BBG Watch Commentary
Russia’s RT posted the full text of fired FBI Director James Comey’s prepared remarks the day before his testimony on Capitol Hill about his conversations with President Donald Trump. BBC also had a report on Comey’s prepared written remarks.
This is what BBC reported with a breaking news headline on its BBC News homepage:
BBC: Mr Comey will say: “He [Mr Trump] then said, ‘I need loyalty.’ I replied, ‘You will always get honesty from me.’ He paused and then said, ‘That’s what I want, honest loyalty.'”
RT
Senate Intelligence Committee publishes Comey’s prepared remarks by RT America on Scribd
As of 2:30 PM ET, the Voice of America (VOA) still has nothing. The seven-page text of Comey prepared remarks was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday afternoon.
RT
RT
The latest VOA report on this topic, “US Intelligence Chiefs Decline to Discuss Conversations with Trump,” was last updated on June 07, 2017 at 2:33 PM ET. It included only one somewhat misleading sentence from James Comey’s prepared written remarks with a link to the full document. The sentence was inserted in the middle of the VOA report and it was not in any way highlighted even though it represented a major new development in the story, as recognized earlier by other news organizations.
Unlike BBC, RT and most other major news media outlets, which treated Comey’s written testimony as a breaking news and put it at the top of their websites, VOA only added “UPDATE” to an old headline on its homepage without any indication what the update was about.
This is the sentence VOA inserted into an old report.
VOA: “On Thursday, Comey, whom Trump fired last month while he was heading the agency’s Russia investigation, is set to testify before the same Senate panel. In an early release of his planned testimony, Comey said Trump in January asked the former FBI chief for personal loyalty and then, on the day after Trump fired Flynn in February, urged him to back off the FBI investigation of Flynn’s Russia connections.”
Even at 3:12 PM ET, the VOA News homepage still has nothing from James Comey’s written remarks to Congress.
