The blizzard of WikiLeaks revelations of collusion between the “mainstream media” and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign – working hand-in-hand behind the scenes to destroy Donald Trump and return the Clintons to the White House – are highly disturbing, but not at all surprising. Here’s why.
Rush Limbaugh’s frequent characterization of the establishment press as “an extension of the Democratic Party” is neither a metaphor nor an exaggeration. It is literally true. As the Media Research Center has long documented, not only is there a virtual “revolving door” between Democratic Party administrations and the “mainstream media” – but to a great extent, the two institutions are made up of the same people!
Many Americans have suspected this, especially when seeing high-profile examples like George Stephanopoulos, the fiercely loyal Clinton partisan who served as White House communications director and senior policy for adviser for Bill Clinton, but who later magically morphed into a top “mainstream” journalist as chief anchor and chief political correspondent for ABC News, co-anchor of “Good Morning America,” host of ABC’s “Sunday Morning This Week” and regular substitute anchor for “ABC World News Tonight.” One of the thousands of just-leaked Clinton campaign emails strongly suggests Hillary’s campaign colluded with Stephanopoulos before his interview with “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer last year (an interview for which Stephanopoulos was later criticized for not disclosing he’d personally donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation).
Even more egregious, another WikiLeaks email dump reveals that Donna Brazile, while at CNN, was literally Clinton’s mole – feeding her intel about Bernie Sanders attacks during the primary season, and reportedly tipping off Clinton as to questions that would be asked at upcoming town hall meetings. After Debbie Wasserman Schultz (thanks to revelations from an earlier WikiLeaks data-dump) was fired as chair of the Democratic National Committee for sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ primary run, she was replaced as DNC chair by Brazile.
But Stephanopoulos and Brazile are just the tip of the iceberg. Here, courtesy of MRC, are just a few more of the countless other Obama-era examples of the wild revolving door between the left-wing “mainstream media” and the left-wing government:
- Jay Carney, once Time magazine’s Washington correspondent, and later Time’s Washington bureau chief, became assistant to the vice president and director of communications for Vice President Joe Biden, and eventually White House press secretary for Barack Obama. Then in September 2014, Carney jumped back into the “mainstream media,” joining CNN as senior political commentator.
- Samantha Power, a foreign correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe and the New Republic, became special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights on the National Security Staff, later becoming the highly influential U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Obama.
- David Axelrod, once a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, became chief strategist for the Obama presidential campaign and later Obama’s senior adviser. Since 2013, he has gone back to the media, working as a senior political analyst for MSNBC, and more recently, for CNN.
- Ronan Farrow, a special adviser for humanitarian and NGO affairs in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama, and later a special adviser to the secretary of state, Office of Global Youth Issues, became host of MSNBC’s “Ronan Farrow Daily” in 2014. After the show was canceled, Farrow became special correspondent for MSNBC and the NBC News Investigative Unit.
- Aneesh Raman, a CNN Middle East correspondent, worked in communications for the 2008 Obama campaign, later becoming a speechwriter for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and ultimately a speechwriter for President Barack Obama.
- Jane Pauley, co-host of NBC’s “Today” and later co-host of “Dateline NBC,” campaigned in Indiana for Barack Obama in 2008, later going back to the “Today” show in 2010. Pauley subsequently joined CBS News as a contributor to “CBS News Sunday Morning.”
- Shailagh Murray, a Wall Street Journal correspondent and later Washington Post political reporter, became the communications director for Vice President Joe Biden and was later named senior adviser to President Obama.
- Desson Thomson, Washington Post film critic, became a speechwriter for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
- Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time.com and later managing editor of Time magazine, became undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs under Obama.
- Beverley Lumpkin, long-time Justice Department correspondent in the Washington bureaus of CBS News and ABC News, became press secretary at the Justice Department under Obama.
- Warren Bass, senior editor of the Washington Post’s “Book World” and deputy editor of the “Outlook” section, became director of speechwriting and senior policy adviser to Obama’s U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice.
- Glen Johnson, online politics editor for the Boston Globe and journalist with the Associated Press, became deputy assistant secretary of state, Bureau of Public Affairs, and senior adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry.
- Peter Gosselin, a Los Angeles Times Washington and economics correspondent, became chief speechwriter for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in 2009, eventually moving back into the media as senior health-care analyst with Bloomberg Government.
- Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer for Catalist, a voter database provider who worked for the Obama for America campaign in 2008, later became chief digital officer and senior vice president of the Washington Post Company.
- Tara Sonenshine, ABC News Washington Bureau producer and later editorial producer for ABC’s “Nightline,” became undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama administration.
- Desiree Rogers, White House social secretary under Obama, became chief executive officer of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company, owner of Ebony and Jet magazines.
Again, there are countless other examples, as MRC documents, but these are sufficient to make the point.
As I write in the introduction to the current issue of Whistleblower magazine, titled “HILLARY’S ULTIMATE WEAPON: America’s biased and abusive news media finally abandon all pretense of fairness”:
Only one thing could be more bizarre, in the United States of America, than electing Hillary Rodham Clinton as president – a sick old woman who lies constantly, values nothing but her own power and wealth, has accomplished nothing of value, advocates disastrous policies, and has spent a lifetime wallowing in criminality and corruption – and pulling all those around her down into the same muck.
That one thing even more bizarre would be the current specter of virtually the entire establishment news media, who traditionally have feigned impartiality and fairness, now falling over one another in a frenzied public campaign to put the Clintons back in the White House.
Now you know why. The “mainstream press” is increasingly just a pretense, an act, a show – just one more grand venue in which progressive-left activists can labor together to transform America. When they get tired of being “journalists” and “analysts” – or get a better job offer – they can always jump back into being part of a left-wing administration. After all, it’s really all the same show.
Just as when you watch a skit on “Saturday Night Live” with lefty comedians portraying journalists and politicians, the “mainstream press” is full of progressive actors performing their parts. The only difference is, they’re not funny.
