BIAS ALERT: Former NBC news man calls for release
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Michael Isikoff, the legendary investigative reporter who uncovered the Monica Lewinsky scandal only to have it spiked by Newsweek, is calling on NBC to release the full tape of its 1999 interview with alleged Bill Clinton rape victim Juanita Broaddrick.
Isikoff said Thursday during an online discussion at Sidewire.com that NBC is in possession of a tape of Juanita Broaddrick being interviewed by former NBC senior investigative correspondent Lisa Myers in the late 1990s, and should release it in full before the election, now that the network is “culling their archives.”
The leaked tape of Donald Trump making lewd comments about women in 2005, which has become the most explosive development in the 2016 election, also came from the NBC archives.
Broaddrick, who claims Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, has accused NBC of editing out a portion of her interview in which she discussed Hillary Clinton’s role silencing her and other victims.
“NBC has the full tape of the original Lisa Myers interview,” said Isikoff, who is a former NBC News investigative correspondent. “NBC ought to check its archive and run the full interview.”
Isikoff also said that Lisa Meyers, who retired from NBC in 2014, has confirmed Broaddrick’s claim that NBC producers edited the interview by deleting portions that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton.
“Broaddrick said it got cut out; Lisa Myers has since agreed Broaddrick said this then—and NBC chose to cut it out,” said Isikoff, who added that Broaddrick’s story was closely vetted by NBC and the Washington Post before the outlets chose to run stories about her.
Interestingly, the current chairman of NBC News, Andy Lack, was also president of NBC News in the late 1990s when the edited version of the Broaddrick interview ran. Lack, who notoriously told the New York Times in 1997 that “I am America’s news leader”, personally oversaw the production of the original Broaddrick report in 1999. “I kept asking for more information and more cross-checking and more digging, and that takes time,” he told the Washington Post.
At the time, Lack and NBC were heavily criticized for sitting on the Broaddrick interview and not airing it until Bill Clinton had been acquitted during his Senate impeachment trial.