One of MSNBC’s favorite guests throughout 2018, celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison last week for attempting to extort $25 million from Nike, but you wouldn’t know much about it if you watched MSNBC.
With all the media attention the network showered upon Avenatti when he was a favorite liberal attack on former President Donald Trump, the fact that he is heading to prison seems newsworthy, but of course these networks don’t want to highlight the fact that they backed a criminal in their pursuit of destroying Trump. As Fox News reported, MSNBC devoted less than 2 minutes to Avenatti’s sentencing, after inviting him on as a guest more than 100 times.
“After avoiding the breaking news on Thursday, MSNBC dedicated less than two minutes of coverage to Avenatti’s sentencing on Friday, according to Grabien transcripts,” Fox reported. “The two programs that bothered to mention Avenatti were ‘Way Too Early with Kasie Hunt’ and ‘Morning Joe,’ completely moving on from the subject by 6:15 am ET.”
“None of MSNBC’s most-watched primetime hosts, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, mentioned Avenatti once in the combined six hours of coverage between Thursday and Friday,” Fox added.
As The Daily Wire’s Ben Zeisloft reported, MSNBC wasn’t alone in featuring Avenatti numerous times. In the year before Avenatti was arrested for domestic abuse charges (which came before the Nike extortion scheme), liberal media outlets featured Avenatti as a guest 254 times, with nearly half (48%) of those appearances on CNN alone.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Johnson also noted the media’s “love affair” with Avenatti:
The media’s love affair was a mutual intoxication: Avenatti made 254 appearances on cable or network news between March 2018 and April 2019. No fewer than 147 of those came between March 7 and May 15, 2018 — roughly two interviews a day. That includes 179 interviews in three months between March and June 2018, according to the Media Research Center: 121 on CNN, 108 on MSNBC, and 24 on the Big Three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS). Often the interviewer spent much of the air time gushing over Avenatti, as when Joy Reid gushed, “He’s good.” In all, the media gave Michael Avenatti the equivalent of $175 million in free media (more specifically: $174,631,598.07), according to an analysis from The Washington Free Beacon.
Johnson also pointed out many of the most embarrassing moments of the media salivating over Avenatti, including CNN’s Brian Stelter, who in 2018 said he was taking Avenatti seriously as a 2020 contender against Trump “because of your presence on cable news.” CNN’s Ana Navarro called Avenatti “the Holy Spirit” during one of her panels with the attorney.
In addition to the extortion charges, Avenatti still faces charges in California and New York regarding allegations he stole millions of dollars from his clients, including porn star Stormy Daniels, whose accusations of an affair with Trump launched Avenatti into the public eye.