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Tara Reade: 19 Days Before the Times Ran It, and a Fraction of the Kavanaugh Airtime

Former Senate staffer Tara Reade publicly accused Joe Biden of a 1993 sexual assault in March 2020. Major papers waited weeks to report it, and cable coverage outside Fox was thin, in contrast with the near-constant coverage of the 2018 Kavanaugh allegations. Her credibility later collapsed on separate grounds.

Mar 25, 2020
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Whose side it served: Democrats

Thin coverage during the primary-to-general transition spared the presumptive Democratic nominee.

What the record shows

Reade made the allegation in a March 25, 2020 interview with Katie Halper. The New York Times published its account on April 12, 2020. In late April, Business Insider and CNN reported that a former neighbor, Lynda LaCasse, said Reade had told her about the assault in the mid-1990s, and a 1993 Larry King Live call from a woman CNN identified as Reade's mother surfaced. Biden denied the allegation on May 1, 2020. Afterward, Reade's education claims under oath were disputed, and in 2023 she announced from Moscow that she had moved to Russia. The GDELT Project's TV monitoring counted Reade-name mentions through May 6, 2020 at 584 on Fox News, 209 on MSNBC and 66 on CNN, noting that CNN and MSNBC did not cover the allegation in detail until May 1. GDELT contrasted this with the Kavanaugh allegations, which received 'near-constant coverage on television news for more than a month,' and a May 18 GDELT post found Reade had 'all but disappeared' from TV news. No side-by-side minute count of Reade versus Kavanaugh was found.

The other side

Editors said the delay reflected weeks of reporting to check a decades-old claim, and the later findings about Reade's sworn testimony and her move to Russia lent support to caution. Fox gave Reade far more coverage than it gave allegations against Trump, so the coverage gap ran both ways.

Sources

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