Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (13 page)

John Seigenthaler was an assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and also an assistant to President Kennedy’s liaison to Governor George Wallace. He went on to become the editor and publisher of the
Nashville Tennessean,
editorial director of
USA Today,
president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and president of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.

The number of former Democrat staffers in prominent media positions is especially impressive when you consider that the last Democratic administration for which there is complete data was Jimmy Carter. It’s still too early to know where all the Clinton administration flacks will land. But we do know where a lot of them came from.

Sidney Blumenthal, a correspondent for the
New Yorker
and former reporter for the
Washington Post,
was Clinton’s political advisor.

Donald Baer, assistant managing editor of
U.S. News & World Report,
became the director of White House speechwriting.

Carolyn Curiel, a
Nightline
producer and former
New York Times
editor, was a speechwriter.

Thomas Ross, senior vice president of NBC News, was special assistant to the president under Clinton and senior director of public affairs at the National Security Council.

Tara Sonenshine, a
Nightline
producer, worked for Clinton’s National Security Council.

Strobe Talbott,
Time
magazine’s Washington bureau chief in the late 1980s, who penned fawning paeans about candidate Clinton for
Time
during the campaign, promptly became Clinton’s U.S. ambassador at large to the former Soviet Union and was soon promoted to deputy secretary of state.

Talbott’s tributes to Bill Clinton for
Time
magazine during the campaign created no incensed outcries from the media watchdogs. Indeed, the
Washington Post
treated Talbott’s unregulated campaign donations to Clinton as a recommendation for the job, rather than an outrageous ethical lapse. The
Post
nonjudgmentally noted simply that Talbott “brings with him not only a major policy brief—the former Soviet Union—but also a closeness to President Clinton.”
⁴⁰

Hailing from a family of Democratic politicians also appears to be an excellent springboard for a career in journalism. Though liberals treated the discovery of a Bush cousin at Fox News like a latter-day Kim Philby scandal, working for the media is fairly common in Democrat families. In the Relatives of Politicians category of on-air television personalities alone, there are:

Chris Cuomo, ABC correspondent and son of former Democrat governor of New York.

Eleanor Mondale,
E!
correspondent and daughter of Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale.

Cokie Roberts, co-host of ABC’s
This Week,
both of whose parents were Democratic congressmen; her father was Representative Hale Boggs, House majority leader.

Maria Shriver, NBC correspondent and niece of Teddy Kennedy.

Evan Thomas, the
Newsweek
Washington bureau chief and frequent CNBC guest who, when Bob Kerrey was considering a run for president, helped kill the
Newsweek
story on Kerrey killing civilians in Vietnam, is the son of Norman Thomas, a four-time Socialist candidate for president.

Even being the candidate yourself is a good precursor to a career in journalism provided you are a Democrat. After fluffing the pillows for John and Robert Kennedy from 1961 to 1968, Pierre Salinger was appointed a United States senator from California when the incumbent died. (He was beaten by a conservative Republican the moment Californians were consulted on the matter.) Upon losing his appointed Senate seat, Salinger went to work for ABC News. Since Salinger pledged to leave the country if Bush were elected, we may finally be free of him.

Running for president in the Democratic primaries was Jesse Jackson’s stepping stone to his own show on CNN, unironically titled
Both Sides.
Jackson’s show wasn’t even a Mutt and Jeff routine, with a conservative analyst to provide balance. Jackson was the sole host. Jackson had already run for president twice and was contemplating a third run when CNN gave him his own show.
⁴¹
This would have been like CNN making Patrick Buchanan the sole host of
Crossfire
between his runs for president, except that Buchanan was a lot more popular with the American electorate than Jackson was. Indeed, Jackson isn’t just a Democrat. He’s the man who stood on Cuban soil and chanted, “Long Live Fidel Castro, Long Live Che Guevara!”
⁴²

An entertainment column in the
Los Angeles Times
took note of CNN’s giving Jackson his own show and praised the network for broadening the ideological spectrum on TV. Jackson, it seems, would be the first “openly partisan liberal host of a public affairs talk or interview series.” This was “important” because “the range of political opinion in public affairs shows usually ranges from moderate to conservative, almost totally excluding the left.”
⁴³

We will raid their wine cellars and have their women!

Jackson’s son also got his own television show—while actually serving in Congress. A CBS-owned Chicago television station, WBBM-Channel 2, gave the Democratic congressman his own talk show,
Chicago Focus with Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.
⁴⁴

There is nothing inherently wrong with partisan public service as a precursor to a career in journalism: It is not manifestly obvious why people without political experience would make superior journalists or be any less objective than
New York Times
editor Pinch Sulzberger or CBS’s Dan Rather. But it would be nice if more than one party were permitted to make the transition through the infamous “revolving door.” Being a liberal Democrat is simply not considered partisan, certainly nothing meriting comment. Only Republicans within the media club cry out for denunciatory editorials in the
New York Times.

In the midst of this flowering of ideological diversity in the news business, CBS hired former Congresswoman Susan Molinari in 1997 to co-anchor a new Saturday morning show. Molinari’s job was to cover cooking, fitness, and movies.
⁴⁵

Judging by the media reaction, you could be forgiven for thinking CBS had turned over its entire news division to the Republican National Committee. The
New York Times
editorialized on this offense to objective news reporting in a huffy piece titled “The GOP News from CBS.” At the press conference announcing Molinari’s hiring, the first question from the watchdog press was “How can you make Susan Molinari a quote-unquote CBS anchorperson when she’s put no time in the news business and is an absolute amateur?” A CBS executive quickly justified the hiring, promising that Molinari would be limited to analysis, not commentary.
⁴⁶
Or was it commentary but not analysis ? In an example of how professional journalists nail down details like that—in contradistinction to “quote-unquote” journalists like Molinari—columnist Sandy Grady said Molinari was limited to “commentary, not analysis.” But the
New York Times
reported she was restricted to “analysis” but not “commentary.”
⁴⁷
In any event, Molinari would be on a tight leash.

Anonymous Molinari critics were cited in the
New York Times
questioning “whether she can be neutral in reporting and interviewing, given her partisan Republican background.”
⁴⁸
Nonanonymous National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg showed how serious journalists work, remarking of Molinari’s CBS gig, “Well, this really makes me want to puke. You know, at least CBS had the decency, when they hired Diane Sawyer from the Nixon White House, to make her go out and stand in the rain for a year or so, to earn her position.... [I]t really, it just makes me want to throw up.”
⁴⁹

At the time of Totenberg’s hard-hitting analysis, NPR’s president was Delano Lewis, who had been chief fund-raiser for Washington Mayor Marion Barry. He had joined NPR when the former president Douglas Bennet, a Carter administration refuge, left to join the Clinton administration. Ben-net had replaced Frank Mankiewicz, who had worked for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

But the press was seized with anxiety about Molinari’s job giving cooking and sewing tips on a morning TV show. As the
New York Times
put it, there was concern about the “potentially awkward transition from being one of the nation’s best-known advocates of Republican ideology to becoming a CBS News anchor.”

More than one hundred newspaper articles were published on the threat to honest journalism posed by CBS’s hiring of Molinari (moderate, pro-abortion Republican Molinari). The headlines barely convey the hysteria: “CBS Adds Molinari, Loses Credibility,”
⁵⁰
“Hiring Susan Molinari, a Ratings-Hungry CBS Gave TV Journalism a Setback,”
⁵¹
“Molinari Move to CBS Blurs Journalistic, Political Lines,”
⁵²
“Government-Media Revolving Door a Threat to Press,”
⁵³
“Is It News, or Is It Propaganda?”
⁵⁴
“The Faces Are New, the Biases Aren’t,”
⁵⁵
“Susan Molinari’s Signing with CBS News Causing Quite a Stir.”
⁵⁶
The most detatched editorial title was from the
Hartford Courant:
“Susan Molinari Is Not Walter Cronkite.”
⁵⁷
Yes, Walter Cronkite was a pious left-wing blowhard. Molinari may have been a pro-choice “moderate Republican,” but at least she was not Walter Cronkite.

Media liberals not only personally know no conservatives, but they frequently appear to be completely unaware that conservatives exist. They must still be puzzling over Reagan’s landslides.

As impish fate would have it, at about the same time CBS hired Molinari, it was also hiring another former member of Congress: Democratic Senator and future presidential candidate Bill Bradley. Bradley was not restricted to decorating tips, but was hired to deliver serious news pieces on
CBS Evening News.
There wouldn’t have been a peep about CBS hiring Bradley, who also had no experience in journalism, but for the hapless fluke of being so close in time to the Molinari emergency. As it was, Bradley’s hiring was mentioned only as a sidebar to articles furiously condemning CBS for hiring Molinari. A LexisNexis search for 1997 turns up fifty news items that mention Molinari in the same sentence as “revolving door.” Only twelve of those articles include so much as a reference to Bradley. Meanwhile every single news item that uses the term “revolving door” in a sentence with Bradley—all seventeen of them—also mentions Molinari.
⁵⁸

Having purged Susan Molinari from the media after a mercifully short ten months on air, only two Republican interlopers remain: Pete Williams and the “revolving door” champion Diane Sawyer.

After serving as Pentagon spokesman under Bush (41), Pete Williams became a correspondent for NBC News. Williams’s move to NBC was marked by the calm, measured response one has come to expect from the pulpits of elite opinion. In a lengthy screed in the
Washington Post
criticizing NBC’s hiring of Williams, a college professor proclaimed it “especially troubling” since Williams was “the antithesis of the qualities NBC and other news organizations should be looking for in reporters.”
⁵⁹
With the left’s typical Vincent Pealean sanctimony, a writer for
Newsday
said Williams’s move to NBC should be a “wake-up call for journalism” and accused Williams of having “consistently misled not only the media but the public on the reality of events” surrounding Pentagon business.
⁶⁰
It seems that Williams did not promptly provide the U.S. press corps with information that would help the press demoralize American troops.

One columnist compared Williams to a reporter for the
News Tribune
who was demoted to the copy desk after she ran a campaign for a gay rights law and publicly joined the Freedom Socialist party.
⁶¹
(This was done in evident violation of her employer’s prohibition on outside political activities.) The existential fact of being a Republican is equivalent to a liberal journalist leading a political campaign in violation of her newspaper’s policy.

Media “experts,” such as Everette E. Dennis of Columbia University’s media center (technically, the more verbose Freedom Forum Media Studies Center) proclaimed Williams’s job with NBC a “conflict of interest, I mean pure and simple.” Marvin Kalb, then director of the similarly verbose Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, expressed concern that the Williams hire would further “blur the lines” between politics and journalism. (In a sublime famous-last-words moment, Kalb proposed the media adopt guidelines modeled on the Clinton administration’s ethics rules.
⁶²
)

When Williams left the Pentagon, the Clinton administration replaced him with Kathleen DeLaski... a correspondent for ABC News.
⁶³
DeLaski’s turn through the revolving door took her from ABC to the Clinton administration, and then back to journalism, on AOL’s political website. She managed the transition without a whisper of protest and very few mentions of the “revolving door.”