Sunday talk shows largely ignore WikiLeaks’ Iraq files

It's believed that late Friday afternoon is the best time to drop bad news, such as rising unemployment numbers or massive layoffs.

So WikiLeaks' decision to publish 400,000 secret Iraq war documents late Friday—and lift embargoes for news organizations that had the cache ahead of time—was striking because it went against the conventional wisdom for making the greatest impact in the news cycle. (And it was almost midnight in Europe when the online clearinghouse released its latest of government documents, even though WikiLeaks had collaborated with several European outlets in preparing the material for publication.)

Yet the WikiLeaks document dump got lots of attention immediately online Friday, throughout Saturday—after a news conference with founder Julian Assange—and in the Sunday papers, including a couple of stories splashed across the front page of the New York Times.

But the major Sunday-morning public-affairs shows—on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and CNN—largely ignored the biggest intelligence leak in U.S. history in favor of the fast-approaching midterm elections.

CBS host Bob Schieffer told The Upshot that the aim at "Face the Nation" for the past month has been "to concentrate on the election, and so every show's been about that."

Schieffer said he'd already booked Republican operative and analyst Karl Rove and U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to speak about the upcoming election and "didn't see either one of them adding much to the discussion on WikiLeaks, quite frankly."

From his perspective, Schieffer said, the nearly 400,000 classified documents—which offered new details about abuses by Iraqi security forces and the extent of civilian casualties—didn't provide any "overriding headline" but mostly confirmed things already known. "That's why we didn't tear up the show to get people to talk about it," he said.

Schieffer added that he has concerns over publication of the classified document cache. "I have real questions in my own mind whether they should have done this," he said.

Christiane Amanpour, a veteran foreign correspondent and host of ABC's "This Week," was the only Sunday show host to mention WikiLeaks.

"WikiLeaks is an important story and should matter to the American people," Amanpour said in a statement. "Clearly the lead of our program this Sunday was the midterm elections, but we dealt with national security in our interview with Gen. Hugh Shelton and asked him about some of the issues that the leaked documents raised."

Indeed, Amanpour cited the leak while asking Shelton about the growing role of military contractors, one of the issues that the Times covered on Sunday's front page.

However, the leak wasn't a topic of conversation during the show's roundtable segment.

CNN's Candy Crowley brought up the Iraq war in a Florida Senate debate she moderated during Sunday's "State of the Union," but she didn't specifically mention WikiLeaks.

It's not surprising that the election took center stage Sunday. But it's worth remembering that in the waning days of the 2002 midterm cycle, Bush administration officials -- such as Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell -- flocked to the Sunday shows to argue for invading Iraq. For instance, Rice famously told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."