Tim Walz's Pedophile Pardon Gets Skipped on TV

Tim Graham on Jul 22, 2026

Sexual abuse of minors is a serious crime. But when it comes to the national media, the crime is only serious if it can make Republicans look bad. Recently, Curtis Houck of the Media Research Center found that ABC, CBS and NBC devoted 1,627 minutes of airtime on their morning, evening and Sunday shows over the last year to the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, which was overwhelmingly concentrated on Donald Trump.

On July 2, The New York Times reported on the front page that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and two other officials pardoned Tou Lue Vang -- a man convicted of repeatedly sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl -- so he could avoid deportation by the Trump administration. Vang's original order of removal came in 2006.

Where were ABC, CBS and NBC on this scandal? We couldn't find any broadcast coverage. PBS and NPR didn't show up on this story, either. Walz was almost vice president, and they still couldn't find it.

They skipped it again on July 10, when ICE deported Vang, about 20 years too late. Laos was not accepting the return of Laotians back in the George W. Bush era, but they are now.

Walz only came up on MS NOW in recounting the ICE shootings in Minnesota earlier in the year. On CNN, we could only find one mention of Walz's pardon, on Abby Phillip's "NewsNight" show, when former Trump press aide Caroline Sunshine briefly brought it up on July 10, but Phillip smothered it down, asking what that had to do with the man shot in Houston by ICE, who had no criminal record.

Three nights later, Phillip was more interested in discussing "far-right" people who were supposed to seek a pardon for the rapper named "Boosie Badazz."

The local media were pro-Walz. On July 17, the Minnesota Star Tribune, the biggest newspaper in the Gopher State, featured a "Cheers & Jeers" column by opinion writer Rochelle Olson. She offered "Cheers" to Walz for pardoning the pedophile! "Vang's actions 20 years ago were awful, but so were the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and those folks received presidential pardons," Olson wrote.

Please recall that hundreds of people pardoned in the Jan. 6 prosecutions were convicted of "parading," or the crime of being present in the Capitol for a few minutes and taking photographs for their Facebook page. To compare those offenders to pedophiles is ludicrous. Even people convicted of assaulting cops don't compare with repeatedly raping a 10-year-old girl. This demonstrates how much knee-jerk liberals transform criminal migrants into automatic heroes or victims in their anti-Trump narrative.

Not every Democrat in Minnesota agreed with the Walz folks. The New York Times reported the attorney's office in Ramsey County (that includes St. Paul), which handled Vang's prosecution long ago, opposed this pardon. Tami McConkey, an official there, wrote that Vang had received a lenient sentence of 30 years' probation in part because the victim in the case, who was then 12, "was experiencing pressure from her family to not cooperate." Vang's victim supported the Walz pardon, saying she forgave Vang for his crimes.

These networks display a dramatic double standard on pedophilia. It all depends on which party is facing a pedophile scandal. They dramatically overplayed the Epstein conspiracies, but Walz was handed a security blanket of omission. Walz can side with a convicted pedophile over the Evil President and what he called Trump's "personal Gestapo," and they'll stick to covering big summer stories like a bear stealing golf clubs.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.