Eric LeCompte of Jubilee USA Network and Catholic leaders - Sister Susan Vickers from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and Reverend Seamus Finn from the JPIC Ministry of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate - sent a letter to the producers of NBC Nightly News and ABC World News to stop their blackout of coverage over the last month on a major banking scandal - the LIBOR scandal.

The LIBOR scandal is one of the biggest banking scandals of our time. The manipulation of the LIBOR, a critical bank setting interest rate that affects payments for more than 800 trillion dollars of financial instruments.

A report released last week by Media Matters for America noted, “Despite the enormous implications of the scandal, ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News both ignored the story in the 16 days after news of the Barclays fine broke, as we documented earlier this month. In the 16 days following the period of our original study, the LIBOR blackout has continued on ABC and NBC's flagship evening news programs. Those programs have gone more than a month without mentioning the controversy.”

The organizations represent almost all of the mainline Churches, more than 100 national organizations and 200 congregations that are concerned about continued corruption in our banking system. The manipulation of these rates affects people across the income spectrum. As faith-based organizations we must stress that this corruption has severe repercussions for the poor and most vulnerable. In the letters, we request that ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News immediately start to cover these banking scandals and their impact on average Americans and poor people around the world.